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DATES 
 
 important 
 characterise 
 of different areas 
 
 DANUBIAN, AREA 
 
 CDACEDONIA AND 
 
 THESSALY 
 
 -i 
 
 MAINLAND 
 OF 
 
 GREECE 
 
 1 
 
 3000 
 
 i 
 2&00 
 
 0000 
 l600 
 WOO 
 
 JOO 
 
 500 
 
 AOO 
 150 
 
 Transition 
 to metal 
 
 Use of bronze 
 
 Use of iron 
 Trojan u?ar 
 
 Period qf Greelc 
 Colonisation 
 
 Persian IDars * 
 
 Peloponnesian 
 r War- 
 
 Rise of (Eacedon 
 
 Neolithic 
 
 Neolithic 
 
 Danubian Bronze 
 Age and suruiuals 
 of Neolithic 
 
 Intrusiue 
 fllucenean 
 
 Pressure from 
 North 
 
 (? Dorian) 
 
 Hellenic control 
 of Morth Aegean 
 eoash 
 
 Hellenic control 
 of North Ae crean 
 J coast- * 
 
 Neolithic 
 
 (Dainland culture 
 under Northern 
 influence 
 
 Intrusiue Cretan 
 influence 
 
 (Tlucenean 
 
 Dorian 
 
 6arlu 
 
 Hellenic 
 
 Full 
 
 Hellenic 
 
 Hellenistic 
 
 (Macedonian 
 domination 
 
 Roman 
 
 domination 
 
 Roman 
 
 domination 
 
 Chronological 
 
 Tabic showing the Del 
 
 Note. Thick lines indicate a radical chancre of culture or control afjictincr *he I 
 
CKETE 
 AND 
 WCHIPELAGO 
 
 asia enmon, 
 
 AND 
 MIDDLE EAST 
 
 EGYPT' 
 
 DATES 
 B.C. 
 
 leoUthic 
 
 tetan 
 and 
 ftjcladic 
 
 Cretan 
 and 
 <?yctadU 
 
 T]ucenean 
 
 Rise of 
 Babylonian 
 €mpire 
 
 Babylonia 
 
 RiseofHitttte 
 
 6mpire 
 Rise of 
 Assyrian 
 6mpire 
 
 Colonisation of 
 Ionia 
 
 Lydian and 
 Persian Empires 
 
 Decline of Persian 
 Empire 
 
 1st Dynasty 
 
 12*1* Dunastu 
 
 JJkhj Dynasties 
 
 Decline of 6iupt" 
 *£ij Dynasty 
 
 26^ Dynasty 
 
 Isolation of 
 
 Macedonian 
 domination 
 
 Roman 
 
 domination 
 
 3000 
 
 J 
 
 rtoo 
 
 <2000 
 
 \6oo 
 
 YlOO 
 100 
 
 500 
 400 
 
 150 
 
 ?orian 
 
 :arlu 
 
 Hellenic 
 
 ull 
 
 Hellenic 
 
 iellentstic 
 
 ^onanest of Persia 
 by Alexander 
 
 Roman 
 
 domination 
 
 Zoman 
 
 domination 
 
 topment of Culture in Jlffirmt areas 
 
 V-hole area jundatnmtallu 
 
GIFT OF 
 JANE K.SATHER 
 
 : : : 
 
BRONZE HEAD OF A YOUTH IN THE 
 LOUVRE (from Beneventum) 
 
ANCIENT 
 GREECE 
 
 tA Study by 
 STANLEY CASSON 
 
 FELLOW OF NEW COLLEGE. OXFORD 
 
 LONDON 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 1922 
 
3 
 
 
 r\ 
 
 
 Oxford University Press 
 
 London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen 
 
 New York Toronto Melbourne Cape Town 
 
 Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai 
 
 Humphrey Milford Publisher to the University 
 
 Greek o 
 
 2536.4 
 
ANCIENT GREECE 
 
 The study of the language, art, and culture of a dead .civi- 
 lization must always be an unprofitable and unproductive 
 study except to antiquarians and lexicographers. To call the 
 language, art, and culture of Ancient Greece dead is to beg the 
 very question at issue. Different views may be held to-day as 
 to the vitality of the Greek culture that has come down to us, 
 but much that the ancient Greeks themselves achieved was 
 destined, consciously or unconsciously, for posterity. Thucy- 
 dides rightly or wrongly said that his history was ' an ever- 
 lasting possession, not a prize composition that is heard and 
 forgotten '. Plutarch, speaking of the great public buildings 
 of Athens, 1 says : 
 
 1 The works of Pericles were the more marvelled at seeing 
 that they were achieved in but a little time though they were 
 designed for the ages. Each building at the moment of its 
 completion had the stability of age, while in fullness of growth 
 it was as though modern and newly created ; thus a freshness 
 still blooms upon it, keeping it in appearance unsullied by time, 
 as if some ever-fresh breeze and unaging spirit were in its very 
 substance.' 
 
 The truth that Plutarch wrote five centuries after these buildings 
 were erected is not rendered less true to-day by the ravages 
 of time. 
 
 1 Life of Pericles, ch. 13. 
 
 517079 
 
. 
 
 A ncxenl Greece 
 
 
 In the same way the poet Theognis, in a stanza dedicated 
 to his friend, says : 
 
 ' Thou shalt live as a song for all who love music, living or 
 yet to be, as long as earth or sun remain.' 
 
 Another poet, Callimachus, sings of his dead friend, the poet 
 Heracleitus : 
 
 ' Thy nightingales still live, and Death, who grasps at all, grasps 
 not at them.' 
 
 If, then, what the Greeks themselves considered to be 
 designed for posterity are to be dismissed as the antiquities 
 of a dead civilization it can, at least, be urged that we are 
 gainsaying the intentions of the authors themselves. 
 
 The legacy of Ancient Greece must be examined accord- 
 ing to the terms by which it was left to us. If we accept 
 it we must do so in the spirit in which it was given. If we 
 reject it we must do so by showing that the legacy was left 
 to us in error. Because the history of Thucydides and the 
 buildings of Pericles were meant for the ages, the same spirit 
 that infuses them must be sought for in all the other branches 
 of Greek culture which the scholars of so many lands have 
 laboured for so many centuries to present to us in acceptable 
 form. And we can use our own discretion to reject what does 
 not seem to be infused with the spirit of permanence, for not 
 everything that Greece produced was destined for posterity. 
 Some things are of antiquarian interest alone, others are 
 superseded. But what remains will be found to be so fine and 
 so golden a residuum that only short-sightedness will reject it. 
 
 * Dead languages ' and * the remains of a dead civilization ' 
 are thus criticisms that cannot justly be levelled at the legacy 
 of Ancient Greece without doing violence to the intentions 
 of those who left it. 
 
Ancient Greece 
 
 It may be asked what we have in common with Ancient 
 Greece. It will be sufficient answer if we say that we have 
 common ideals. The Greek strove, as we strive, to think 
 ■clearly, to act justly, and to live freely. That he did not succeed 
 completely in doing any one of these things for long is the clear 
 verdict of history, for Greek culture faded in the twilight of 
 philosophic decadence, moral failure, and political subjection. 
 But it is from the failures as well as from the successes of Greece 
 that we can strive to establish the outlines of our own life. 
 Complete success is a hard taskmaster just because it is so hard 
 to live up to. Partial success and the causes of failure provide 
 better instructors to an imperfect world. From its imperfec- 
 tions we can get a hint of what the greatness of Greece might 
 have been ; from its perfections we can learn our own short- 
 comings. 
 
 What makes Greece so unbounded a store of wealth for us 
 to draw from is that the Greeks at the time of the height of 
 their greatness never lost touch with humanity. Whatever 
 they did or thought was judged by the one standard of man- 
 kind. ' Man is the measure of all things ', said their own 
 proverb. And this greatness was the gieatness of a national 
 spirit^ not of a party, a sect, or a dynasty. Assyria and Egypt 
 lack this claim on our human interest just because, in the days 
 of their greatness, humanity appealed less to them than the 
 great ambitions of princes and parties. Herodotus marvelled 
 that Egypt lived according to a rigid class or caste system just 
 because in Greece no such system existed.- Egyptians were 
 classified according to their own system as tradesmen, soldiers, 
 priests, and kinglets ; 1 Greeks could be each and all at the 
 same time. Socrates fought as a soldier in his country's battles 
 at one moment and at another he was arguing philosophy at 
 1 Herodotus, ii. 164 (seven classes are here given). 
 
8 Ancient Greece 
 
 the street corners. Aeschylus the poet, in writing his own 
 epitaph, 1 referred to himself merely as a soldier who had fought 
 at Marathon. Thucydides commanded a naval unit in the 
 very war that he describes. 2 Sculptors were politicians and 
 potters were public men ; Pheidias was impeached by his 
 political opponents, 3 while Mnesiades or Pamphaios 4 the 
 potters dedicated to Athena as fine a monument as did any 
 statesman. 
 
 The whole difference between the new Hellenic world and 
 the old world of static empires is put most clearly and forcibly 
 by Plato. He describes 5 how Solon the Athenian visited Egypt 
 and conversed with the wisest and most distinguished of the 
 Egyptians. 
 
 'He made the discovery', says Plato, 'that neither he nor 
 any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about 
 the times of old. . . . One of the priests, who was of very great 
 age, said to him, " O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never any- 
 thing but boys, and there is not an old man amongst you. . . . 
 In mind you are all young ; there is no old opinion handed 
 down among you by ancient tradition nor any science that is 
 hoary with age." ' 
 
 If humanity is the key-note of Greece we shall not, then, go 
 far wrong in studying what she has left us. But what counts 
 more than the mere fact of her humanity is the fact that 
 Greece represents humanity 's first essay on the grand scale. 
 Never before had mankind set out to solve all the most urgent 
 problems that beset it, and set out in so courageous a spirit. 
 
 1 Athenaeus, 627. 
 
 2 Thucydides, iv. 106. 
 
 3 Plutarch, Life of Pericles, ch. 31. 
 
 4 Acropolis Museum Catalogue, Vol. I, p. 273 and Vol. II, p. 284. 
 
 5 Timaeus, 22. 
 
Ancient Greece 9 
 
 That is why the energy and vigour of the morning of mankind 
 infuse into the works of Ancient Greece what Plutarch calls an 
 1 ever-fresh breeze ', which keeps them fresh and clean. Time and 
 time again in philosophic dialogues, in poems, and in sculpture 
 and the other arts we encounter this clear-cut freshness of mind. 
 Everything which concerned man was of a nature which 
 * admitted of being otherwise ' as Aristotle said. It was man's 
 task, then, to control it as far as possible and understand it 
 according to his standards, to sift the gold from the mud and | 
 to put what he found to the best advantage of mankind. In 
 doing this he had to form his own tests, his own theories of 
 action, and guide his hand by methods which he had to invent, 
 for the most part, for himself. Authority was practically non - 
 existent. He had no centuries of ecclesiastical discipline behind 
 him, no .codes of moral behaviour or theological creeds to 
 guide him into the right path or the wrong. A few vague 
 legends of vaguer empires which had perished before he began ; 
 a story here and there of god or hero that echoed some old 
 half-forgotten origin ; some amazing custom that belonged 
 to the pure barbarism which, with the traditions of broken 
 empires, had contributed to his upbringing — such were what 
 the ancient Greek had as a basis for his speculations, liis 
 experiments, and his plans. The barbarous elements in v his 
 life are often emphasized ; but every nation in every age has 
 had barbarisms as crude and as distasteful. We ourselves are 
 not free from them ; it is only about a century since we ceased 
 to punish theft with hanging, while lynching is still prac- 
 tised. In our own judgements of Ancient Greece we must 
 take what was representative, not what was exceptional ; we 
 must face the difficulty of finding the noimal in a state of 
 civilization that presents to us every type of the normal and 
 abnormal together. 
 
io Ancient Greece 
 
 From this blend of old memories and new ideas arose the 
 civilization of Ancient Greece : 
 
 The half-remembered prowess of dead kings 
 And strange adventures of our fathers, cleaving 
 New pathways in their endless wanderings, 
 Grew dim and faded in the distance, leaving 
 A heritage of tangled memories, 
 Sea-faring and old wars and destinies. 
 
 So silently a new age came to birth. 
 Hellas, new-risen on the hills, was throwing 
 The splendour of its morning on the earth — 
 The sun was up, and the dawn-breezes blowing.' x 
 
 This freshness of spirit and cleanness of outlook was in the 
 nature of the people of Ancient Greece. But freshness and 
 cleanness were also in the nature of the land in which they 
 lived, above all in Attica, the land of the Athenians, and at 
 Corinth. 
 
 ' Attica ', says an old writer, 2 ' has neither vast crags nor 
 rivers rushing between them, as in the Peloponnese and 
 Thessaly ; the land of the Athenians is of light soil and the 
 air they breathe is light and fine, and it rains but seldom and 
 when it does there is no flooding. Their land is skirted by 
 the sea . . . while their city lies in a hollow facing the south. . . . 
 At Corinth the summer is cooled by the gulfs that run into the 
 land from which breezes perpetually blow, while the rock of 
 Acrocorinth casts shadows. These cities, then, are far better 
 than Babylon and Ecbatana and their great buildings are far 
 better built than those of the latter . . . they are inferior in 
 size alone . . . and Athens is half the size of Babylon.' 
 
 The truth of these assertions can be verified by any traveller 
 to-day. The dry brightness of the air and the clear clean 
 
 1 From Achilles, by R. M. Heath, 191 1. 
 
 2 Dio Chrysostom, Oration VI, 197. 
 
Ancient Greece n 
 
 sunlight give a crystalline appearance to things which cannot 
 but affect the minds of those who come fresh to such surround- 
 ings. The visitor to Greece feels at once the stimulating 
 effect of these natural properties. So, too, the ancient Athenian, 
 newly evolved from the disrupted fragments of old empires, 
 felt the stimulus and reacted upon it. And what is true of 
 Athens is true of much of the rest of Greece and the Greek 
 islands. Only as far north as Macedonia does the air lose its 
 clarity and become foggy and dull — and after Macedonia we 
 are in ' Europe ' and finally out of range of that one unifying 
 factor in all Greek history, the sea. 
 
 It is clear, then, that Greece cannot be classed with things 
 dead, gone, and to be forgotten, for two main reasons ; tb" 
 first is because there is in all the pr oduct s of Greek act ivity 
 a literal inspiration- — a breathing in of their temporal and 
 physical environment, which is of so fine and rare a quality as 
 to deserve our instant attention ; the second is because much, 
 if not most, of_what the Greeks produced, was destined for 
 posterity and so demands examination. 
 
 Let us, then, briefly examine the outlines of Greek life as 
 a whole, taking into account its failures as well as its successes. 
 
 The origins of Greek civilization, like the causes of its decay, 
 remain obscure. Of one thing alone we are certain — thaL-the 
 Greeks were racially a mixture which ultimately developed 
 a remarkably unified idea of culture. What this mixture was 
 is not definitely known. Archaeologists and historians alone 
 are competent to hint at a solution. From their researches it 
 seems that for a period of at least two thousand years preceding 
 the year iooo b.c. there was a civilization which, with its 
 centre in the island of Crete, controlled a very large part of 
 the eastern Mediterranean. This civilization, which we 
 know only from its material remains and from a few vague 
 
12 Ancient Greece 
 
 traditions, had nothing in common with that of the Greece 
 of the thousand years after iooo b.c. Its political systems, 
 its art, and its architecture were of the type to which we have 
 become accustomed from our knowledge of Egypt and Assyria 
 in antiquity and of the Moghuls and Seljuks in more recent 
 times. In some details it was superior to them, as in certain 
 artistic conventions and in certain architectural devices, but 
 it belonged essentially to the older world, to the world of 
 caste systems, of princedoms and pageantry, of temporal power. 
 Being an island civilization it was naval rather than military, 
 and, as such, seems to have controlled most of the Mediter- 
 ranean, at least for a time, and to have kept it to a large extent 
 free from piracy for the advantage of commerce. At the height 
 of its power this civilization was in touch with the great powers 
 of the day — Egypt, Assyria, and the Hittite empires — and met 
 them on equal terms. Its influence spread from one end of the 
 Mediterranean to the other, and we find traces of its works in 
 Spain and Palestine, at the head of the Adriatic, and in Egypt. 
 It had all the advantages that profound technical knowledge 
 could confer in matters of handicraft and architecture. It had 
 mastered the elements of sculpture and painting and metal- 
 work and had developed and elaborated one or more systems 
 of writing. But fully developed art we do not find in the sense 
 of free art. Highly developed craftsmanship is there and a 
 capacity for design and form, but artistic creations untrammelled 
 by convention, such as were achieved by Classical Greece within 
 a century of the commencement of artistic production, we do 
 not find. 
 
 Nevertheless the importance of this great culture is very 
 great for subsequent Greece. By establishing in the area which 
 was later to produce the historic Greeks a strong, vigorous, and 
 (as far as its conventions would allow) original craftsmanship, 
 
Ancient Greece 13 
 
 it laid the foundations of an artistic tradition which the 
 invasions and disturbances of subsequent times could not 
 wholly eradicate. The new art of Classical Greece found itself 
 active in a region where the elements of art were not unknown, 
 though we are hardly entitled to infer from this a continuity 
 of artistic tradition. 
 
 Towards the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries b.c. signs 
 of the break-up of this great Cretan culture are apparent. 
 Whether this break-up came ultimately from internal or from 
 external causes we do not know ; all .we can be certain of is 
 that the Cretan civilization develops, reaches its zenith, and 
 declines. The period of its decline is marked by the complete 
 disappearance of whatever original tendencies in craftsmanship 
 had made their appearance. They are displaced by rigid 
 formality and uniformity in design and conception. It is to 
 this period that the term Mycenaean is usually applied ; it is 
 the period of the greatest expansion of commerce, and we can 
 detect signs of the decay of empire, of secession and separation. 
 The great cities on the mainland of Greece, colonized originally 
 from Crete, grow in power and seem to have established them- 
 selves in a more or less independent position. The mother 
 country is losing its importance. But before things can develop 
 farther along these lines a new factor emerges ; new peoples 
 are making their influence felt from a new direction — from 
 the north. The flat rich plains of Central Europe have bred 
 sturdy folk who are pressing to the south towards the region 
 about whose wealth and prosperity stories must have filtered 
 through to the north. At first they come in parties, later in 
 greater bodies, and they are the people who were to form one 
 of the most important ingredients in the future Greece. The 
 main invasion was known in antiquity as that of the Dorians. 
 Almost devoid of art, as are from their nature most nomad 
 
i4 Ancient Greece 
 
 peoples, they finally enveloped and engulfed the peoples of 
 the mainland and the islands. They came down the valley 
 of the Vardar, through what is now Serbia, and, dividing into 
 two streams, went down the east and west coasts of Greece. 
 These two streams finally converged near the apex of the 
 Peloponnese at Sparta, driven towards each other by the 
 triangular shape of the Greek peninsula. At Sparta the bulk 
 of the invaders halted, because they could go no farther. 
 Detachments and separate bodies had halted in and near 
 different towns on the way or gone across the water to various 
 islands. The old citadels of the Cretan colonists fall one after 
 the other. The villages of the indigenous inhabitants must 
 have been overwhelmed in most parts of Greece except where 
 the country was too mountainous for the invader to penetrate. 
 Arcadia was just such a place as this, and tradition agrees that 
 it was immune from invasion. To speak metaphorically of an 
 Arcadia is to depict some quiet peaceful land far removed from 
 the clamours of daily life. The picture is literally true of the 
 Arcadia of history. The metaphor is sound. 
 
 This invasion, which brought with it the break-up of the old 
 Cretan culture, laid the foundations of what was to be the 
 Greece that we know. By the ninth century before Christ 
 the position of Greece was becoming more stabilized. The 
 main force of the invasion was over ; a halt was called, and men 
 could pause and think. The old world was definitely destroyed 
 and a new one had not quite emerged. The elements now T in 
 the mainland civilization of Greece were threefold. There 
 were the Dorians, newly arrived, dominant and vigorous ; the 
 indigenous peoples, some in subjection, others free, the rest 
 exiles ; lastly, the remains of the Cretans on the mainland and 
 in Crete — but what exactly their position was we do not know. 
 In the islands much the same grouping was ultimately reached, 
 
Ancient Greece 15 
 
 but with minor variations. For the most part the Dorians 
 outside the mainland were probably fewer in number than 
 the peoples whom they ruled. In one part of the mainland 
 things went differently. Attica met and received the invaders 
 on equal terms ; she was not subdued. History and tradition 
 are unanimous on this point. So to Attica there came refugees, 
 driven east from the Peloponnese. Finally, says Thucydides, 
 it became so overcrowded that its barren fields could no 
 longer support so great a population. The result was a fresh 
 move eastwards to the coasts of Asia Minor. This move 
 is known in history as the Ionian emigration, because the 
 majority of the refugee colonists were by origin Ionian, and 
 hatred of the invader for the refugee and of the refugee for 
 the invader never died. Near the end of the fifth century 
 a Spartan general encourages his men with the words, ' You are 
 Dorians and are about to fight with Ionians whom you have 
 beaten again and again \ 
 
 The Dorians in the meantime at Sparta, their chief city in 
 the Peloponnese, were taking their place in a fully developed 
 Hellenic world. They had reopened relations with the great 
 empires with which their Cretan predecessors had been in 
 touch. Egypt and the powers of Asia thus again make their 
 influence felt in the Greek peninsula. Lydia and Sparta 
 establish a close relationship, and the old habits of the nomad 
 invader are fast vanishing. The Dorian is merging into the 
 other races, his corners are rubbed off, and his harshness toned 
 down. The old foreign influences reappear to leaven the newly- 
 found art and thought of Hellas. 
 
 By the seventh century the germs of everything that was 
 later to be characteristic of Greece had appeared. Literature 
 was firmly established, its finest masterpieces, by a curious 
 turn in the course of development, having been produced 
 
16 Ancient Greece 
 
 early. Homer is the product of the Dark Ages between the 
 fall of the Mycenaean and Cretan peoples and the establishment 
 of Dorian power. Under what circumstances the Homeric 
 poems were composed is still a matter of dispute. The fact 
 of their existence alone concerns our rapid survey. After Homer 
 comes a pause in literary production, and then it is resumed 
 again, but more along the lines we might have expected. The 
 centres of Hellenic culture, owing to defective communications, 
 are not in close touch. Villages, towns, and occupied regions 
 live secluded and isolated lives. Literature and art, in conse- 
 quence, acquire local characteristics. Hesiod in the plains of 
 Boeotia sings of the farmer's life, of husbandry and cattle, 
 fruit and harvests. Alkman, a little later, writes for the more 
 polished and luxurious city of Sparta, which already in the 
 seventh century was the leading state of Hellas, and was held 
 in repute as such in Asia Minor and the outer world. 
 
 Artistic production, too, is local. There is no uniform style 
 of sculpture or drawing ; Hellas is a collection of groups, held 
 together by a unifying principle which has not as yet been 
 consciously realized. Life is communal, not federal, and the 
 Greeks have not as yet understood what elements of culture 
 and civilization they have in common. 
 
 The first appearance of this unifying principle is probably 
 to be found in a tendency to collect outlying settlements in 
 a district into one place, called in Greek tradition a ' settling 
 together '. This process is recorded in the history of many 
 of the Greek states. Though not always historically a fact, it 
 represents, at any rate, a tendency to unification which must 
 have taken place in most occupied areas. From the nuclei 
 thus created arose later the completely developed Greek 
 state — t he ' city-sta t e ' of historians. In essence the city-state 
 was a concentration into one spot of men whose pursuits and 
 
Ancient Greece 17 
 
 interests were similar and whose method of living was limited 
 largely by geographical considerations. The variety of the 
 geographical setting and various limitations of mountain and 
 plain went far to determine the ultimate nature of the state. 
 A plain, a sea-coast, and a rock-citadel were the elements that 
 went to make up the setting of the majority of Greek states. 
 Athens, Eleusis, Corinth, Megara, and Argos were of this type. 
 In others one or more of these elements were lacking. Sparta 
 had her plain, but no coast, and an insignificant citadel. Larissa 
 in Thessaly was of the same type. Island towns, for the most 
 part, were rock-citadels only or else placed on the inaccessible 
 parts of the islands, seldom if ever on their harbours. The cause 
 of this was the ever-present danger of piratical raids, for, after 
 the fall of Cretan sea-power, there was no guaranteed policing 
 of the seas. Melos, Euboean Kyme, and most of the island 
 towns were of this nature. Later in the fifth century, when the 
 seas were safer, towns were built on the coasts. In Thrace 
 the colonies of Ionia feared aggression not from the sea, for 
 they had no harbours, but from inland, for the tribes of Thrace 
 were unsubdued and turbulent. Abdera and Ainos and the 
 cities founded by Miltiades in Gallipoli were of this type. 
 Colonies so founded served as trading stations or military forts 
 and were stationed either on main trade routes or at places of 
 strategic importance. 
 
 Founded" originally for the sake of self-preservation and safe 
 within the girdle of its walls, the city-state soon became a means 
 of self-development and culture. Each citizen was at the same 
 time both creator and administrator of the laws which con- 
 trolled the destinies of himself and his fellow citizens. Hp 
 voted for the enactment and for the administration of the laws, 
 and thus affords us almost the only instance of a constitution 
 in which the citizen took a direct share in the control of his 
 
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Ancient Greece 19 
 
 caufi-try. In principle all city-states were of this type, at least 
 during the fifth century, though in detail they differed con- 
 siderably. Some of the most successful of the city-states seem 
 to have thrived in Magna Graecia, in Sicily, and on the shores 
 of Italy, and also on the coast of Thrace. The lands from which 
 they drew their wealth were richer than those of mainland 
 Greece, and they were farther removed from the larger political 
 combinations and interstate intrigues of the Peloponnese and 
 Central Greece. Selinus, Catana, and Gela in Sicily; Tarentum, 
 Thurii, and Cumae in Italy ; Abdera, Maroneia, and Ainos in 
 Thrace, afford us better examples of the city-state than we can, 
 as a rule, find in Greece proper. Few of these cities suffered 
 the more devastating results of internal strife or external 
 intrigue and, as a result, art, literature, and philosophy flourished 
 undisturbed by the intermittent cataclysms that were the 
 price that so excellent a mode of living had to pay in many 
 other cities. The history of Megara, Eretria, Argos, Amphipolis, 
 and Olynthus is of cities ravaged by continual strife, whether 
 from within or from without. Except for Theognis, the 
 exiled poet of Megara, or for the sculptors of Argos we hear of 
 nothing but one long tale of party faction. In the group of 
 wealthy Greek cities of Italy and Sicily which the Greeks 
 called Magna Graecia was stored, on the other hand, the wealth 
 of Greek art at its best, and much of the best of literature and 
 philosophy gravitated to or came from their shores. In Thrace 
 too the standard of art was high. Abdera in the days of its 
 prime paid to the treasury of Athens the third largest tribute 
 of all the cities of the Athenian Empire. Pindar wrote a Paean 
 for the Abderites, and Democritus the philosopher and 
 Protagoras were among its citizens. The coins of the cities 
 of this coast rank among the most beautiful of Greece. 
 
 The city-state was thus an institution, peculiar to Greek 
 
 B 2 
 
20 Ancient Greece 
 
 thought and ideals, which was the form under which Greeks 
 chose to live wherever they settled. Panticapaeum in the 
 Crimea, Massalia in France, or Cyrene in Africa, were, as far 
 as concerned the citizens, organized on the same lines. The 
 city in which they lived was at once their home and their 
 country. The boundaries were, if need be, the city walls. 
 If no danger threatened, the boundaries were rather what were 
 fixed by Nature, the mountains that bounded the plain in 
 which the city was built, for it was largely Mediterranean 
 geography that conditioned the growth of the city-state. 
 Within their city they controlled, either as a democracy with 
 a majority vote, or as a minority of ruling classes, or again 
 under the control of a family or of one leading man, the 
 internal and external policy of their land. Whatever the 
 political form of government, the mode of life remained approxi- 
 mately the same for the citizens, with its possibilities of culture 
 and spiritual development. The rougher work and the routine 
 work were frankly and openly given over to slaves, a fact which 
 to-day often meets with harsh criticism. But slaves in Ancient 
 Greece were almost always foreigners or barbarians, though 
 even then they could obtain their freedom by serving well 
 the city of their adoption. Yet while slaves they were treated 
 as slaves, and distinguished from the citizens. An inscription 
 on the wall of the Stadium at Delphi says : ' Food shall not 
 be sold here : punishment — for a citizen a fine of 5 drachmae, 
 for a slave a beating.' 
 
 To understand the freedom of the citizen in the city-state 
 we have to appreciate the fact that in Athens the policemen 
 were slaves ! indeed a paradox to us ! 
 
 Greece in the sixth century had at last found her feet ; her 
 various elements had realized a certain union, not so much 
 of culture as of aim. The various subdivisions of the whole 
 
Ancient Greece 21 
 
 Hellenic race had in common the simple ideal of ' living the 
 good life ', and this to a Greek meant rather the negation of 
 certain things than the assertion of definite intentions. Life 
 was not to be standardized into rigid formulae ; men were 
 not to be ruled by blind authority or by self-imposed potentates ; 
 the city they inhabited was not to consist of a royal palace and 
 its dependent outhouses, like Mycenae, where the dynasts lived 
 on the highest and finest parts of the town and the servile 
 population in what was left. Cretan Cnossos, Babylon, and 
 all the great cities of the old Principalities were not fit habita- 
 tions for the free Hellene, to whom life in a city meant that 
 he could go where he willed when he willed. So the true 
 Hellenic city from the earliest time differed radically from all 
 types of city that had preceded it. The royal palace even as 
 early as Homer, when royal traditions were still strong, was 
 a palace more by general consent than by its outward appear- 
 ance. It is true that the palace of Alcinous in Phaeacia is 
 described as a glorious and resplendent building, but the king's 
 daughter washed the family linen herself. The brothers of 
 Andromache, princess of Troy, were herdsmen, and Herodotus 
 tells us definitely that ' in olden times princes were no richer 
 than other men \ 1 Athena, in the Odyssey, appears before 
 Odysseus disguised as ' a young man, the herdsman of a flock, 
 a young man most delicate as are the sons of kings \ 2 
 
 The glories of the palaces of Alcinous and of Priam, as Homer 
 describes them, were thus rather survivals in literature from 
 a time when such things really existed, when palaces were 
 inhabited by real kings and kings were rich and the old order 
 of static Principalities held the day. The Hellene as he emerged 
 from the Dark Ages had no truck with such things. He had 
 all the world to play in and no rules to spoil the game. Even 
 
 1 viii. I-J7. 2 xiii. 222. 
 
22 Ancient Greece 
 
 his gods had no share in the old pageantry. They moved 
 among men almost as equals, differing from them only in their 
 supernatural habits and the advantages that resulted from 
 them. Athena and Odysseus in the Odyssey confer as friends 
 on the problems that confront them. 1 Strangers were always 
 well treated, not so much on the ordinary grounds of hospitality 
 as for the reason that they might be gods in disguise. ' You 
 never know whom you may be entertaining ' was what the 
 Greek said to himself. ' The early Arcadians,' says Pausanias, 2 
 ' by reason of their righteousness and piety were guests of the 
 gods and sat with them at table.' How different from the 
 Egyptians, who worshipped cats and monkeys and crocodiles, 
 or from the Israelites, who prostrated themselves in awe before 
 a remote and relentless Jehovah. We, with our centuries 
 of abstract religious training behind us, find it hard to see the 
 Greek point of view. Had the Greek no higher conception 
 of gods than this ? had he no idea of what is sacred and holy ? 
 But the Greek himself would not have understood such 
 questions. ' Have you no higher opinion of yourself than 
 this ? ' he would have replied. ' First perfect yourself and 
 your capacities, and then, when you can use them, think hard 
 on what is behind, beneath, and above you.' That, roughly, 
 was his way of being religious. 
 
 But with all his freedom of religious opinion and thought 
 the average Greek was to a large extent restricted by the 
 countless conventions of the supernatural. His gods might be 
 almost men and his men * divine ', a constant epithet in Homer, 
 but behind and below his idea of the gods there lay a dark 
 region of superstition, one of the legacies inherited from his 
 ancestors, who themselves had barely emerged from the 
 labyrinth of tribal magic and mystery. 
 
 xiii. 372. 2 viii. 2. 
 
Ancient Greece 23 
 
 Thus, through the upheavals of the Dark Ages of the 
 Mediterranean the Greek tribes emerged at last, welded into 
 some semblance of a race with certain characteristics in common. 
 The first two or three centuries of their existence they were 
 faced with the elementary difficulties of a settled life wherein 
 the habits of a nomadic existence avail but little. In the 
 process of solving these problems different districts adopted 
 different methods. The inhabitants of the plain of Sparta, 
 in whose blood the spirit of the conqueror was still strong, 
 used the conquered as serfs. To ensure their position they 
 encroached on their neighbours' lands. Tegea and Messenia 
 are two names that bulk large in Spartan history of the 
 eighth and seventh centuries b.c. In the end Messenia was 
 conquered and occupied, her fertile plains yielding great 
 gain to the conqueror, for Messenia consists of a series of 
 shelf-like plateaux well watered and wooded, which then, 
 as to-day, could yield harvests of first-rate quality with the 
 minimum amount of labour. Tegea was never beset so fiercely 
 and held out. 
 
 Corinth approached the problem of how to live in a way that 
 was conditioned by her natural surroundings. Situated, as 
 she was, on an isthmus with a harbour on each gulf, the sea 
 was clearly destined to be her source of revenue. At the same 
 time two great land-routes passed through her territory. The 
 road from west to east along the north shore of thePeloponnese, 
 and so on to the Megarid and Attica, crossed a northern route 
 from Boeotia to the Argolid. 
 
 Other cities met their problems in different ways, according 
 to their conditions and situation. 
 
 The Greeks were thus well drilled in the hardest school of 
 life, in the struggle to make the crude forces of nature conform 
 to the uses of mankind. ' The earth is full of ills and full the 
 
24 Ancient Greece 
 
 sea 'j 1 says Hesiod. ' Bright-eyed hunger ', as he calls it, and 
 the need of water — these two things meant much, and much 
 labour was needed to satisfy both. Water, above all, had a 
 sanctity that we who live in well-watered lands can barely 
 understand. The plain of Argos, ' thirsty Argos ' as Homer 
 calls it, in the height of a Greek summer gives us some idea of 
 what a waterless Greek plain can be. The smaller citadel of 
 Argos can still show wells cut in the dry rock which could only 
 be filled by rain and the condensation of dew, and they are 
 so cut that if only a cupful of water remained it was accessible. 
 In later days the springs and fountains were the first care of 
 reformers, of benevolent despots, and of architects. 
 
 The famous ' Hymn of Man ' in the chorus of the Antigone of 
 Sophocles is the hymn of those who have at last emerged 
 victorious in the struggle with the crude forces of inanimate 
 nature. But greater contests are to come, contests of the soul 
 and of the mind. The first fight only has been won. The 
 groundwork has been laid. 
 
 ' Many are the marvels of the earth, but none more marvellous 
 than man ; man is a creature that ranges the grey ocean in the 
 gales of winter, crossing on its sounding breakers ; and that 
 chiefest of the gods, Earth the indestructible, the unsubduable, 
 he furrows with the plough year in year out, his helper the 
 strong breed of horses ; the care-free tribe of birds and the 
 creatures of the deep and savage beasts he snares with encom- 
 passing nets — O careful-minded, cunning Man ! ' 2 
 
 This is a hymn not of mankind of the great days of Greek 
 culture but of man of only a few centuries before, so close was 
 the border between the developed and the immature. It is 
 this feeling which is characteristic of Greece in evolution. 
 
 1 Works and Days, 101. 
 
 2 Sophocles, Antigone, 332 ff. 
 
26 Ancient Greece 
 
 Man is newly fledged, and that only within six or seven genera- 
 tions ; the old dark wilderness is just close at hand and still 
 within sight ; man must move forwards and not look behind. 
 For these reasons we find little or no trace of the antiquarian 
 spirit, no looking back, no appeal to precedent until much 
 later in his development. Only during the Peloponnesian War 
 did the Greeks begin to talk of ' what their fathers did ', and 
 this, in nine cases out of ten, refers to the great deeds of the 
 Persian wars when the barbarian had been repulsed — a bare 
 fifty years previously. 
 
 But this consciousness of their recent growth is not surprising. 
 Thessaly that bordered upon the marches of civilized Greece 
 remained as savage as Central Asia down to historic times. 
 The frowning buttress of Oeta and the Trachinian cliffs that 
 formed the northern barrier of Greece barely a hundred miles 
 north of Athens looked over country that, even to the sixth 
 century, was quite out of touch with Greek civilization. 
 Farther north still Macedonia was even more primitive, and 
 its peoples were still nomadic ; some of them were scarcely 
 beyond the Neolithic stage of culture and lived, like the 
 Neolithic Swiss, in lake dwellings. 1 
 
 It is hardly surprising, then, that the Greeks felt all too 
 clearly that they had nothing behind them to which they could 
 appeal for guidance — no traditions, no precedents, no accumula- 
 tions of wisdom. We in England, who have sixteen centuries 
 of continuous history of our own kith and kin to guide us, can 
 hardly imagine the way in which the Greeks found themselves 
 thrown on the world into a long struggle against purely physical 
 odds. Can we blame them if, victorious, they speak at times 
 with the boastful naivete of children ? To-day, to the ordinary 
 thinker, there are many stranger things than Man. To the 
 
 1 See Herodotus, v. 16. 
 
h 
 
 w 
 
 o 
 
 H 
 
 o 
 
28 Ancient Greece 
 
 Greek who had just emerged from the struggle Man was some- 
 thing triumphant. He was free to move as he willed on land 
 and sea and to gather his sustenance from their unwilling grasp. 
 
 Under these conditions, then, the Greek spirit was moulded. 
 Free to choose his own means of shaping his actions to suit 
 his surroundings and physical conditions, which, as Aristotle 
 said, ' do not admit of being otherwise ', his methods varied 
 with the varied nature of his surroundings. But in the process 
 of struggle he had acquired much that contributed later to the 
 completion of his development : tireless activity, eager and 
 unfettered curiosity free from the shackles of tradition, and 
 a sleeplessness of mind which kept keen and unwearying watch 
 on the hazards of daily thought and action. The old empires 
 of Crete and Mycenae were scarcely even memories ; the 
 wanderings of the invaders from the north were almost for- 
 gotten ; dangers of sea and sky were overcome, the reluctant 
 fruits of the earth were gathered, and he was ready for the 
 greater tasks — the perfecting of mind and body and the develop- 
 ment of all human faculties. 
 
 Thus, early in his growth, the Greek had firmly implanted in 
 his character certain qualities which we of an older world 
 strive hard and only too often unsuccessfully to acquire. His 
 methods were direct, his endurance unlimited, and his energy 
 tireless. He could call a spade a spade without self-conscious- 
 ness, he could worry at a problem until he solved it, or thought 
 he had solved it, and he was always ready to consider and deal 
 with something new. 
 
 In a nature composed of such elements possibilities are 
 infinite. Hence the poetry, drama, art, and philosophy of his 
 day had no common standards of type. Every variety of 
 talent was exhibited. One common factor alone distinguishes 
 the early history, literature, and art, and survives until the 
 
Ancient Greece 29 
 
 full perfection of Greek culture — the factor of originality. 
 As we have seen, self-consciousness was not in the nature 
 of early Greek thought and action. The individual as such 
 seldom counts. History in the seventh and early centuries is 
 the history of clans, of families, and of states. The affairs of 
 Athens in the sixth century are largely managed by the old 
 families such as the Alcmaeonidae, the Gephyraei, or the 
 Paeonidae, or by social groups such as the ' sea-shore folk ', 
 the ' farmers from over the hills ', or the ' merchant landowners 
 of the Athenian plain '. Sparta at the same period is controlled 
 by Spartiates, the old stock of the conquerors, amongst whom 
 personal ambition was sternly repressed ; under them was the 
 subject population of the conquered. Most individuals in 
 early Greece whose names have come down to us have had an 
 individualism that is largely spurious attributed to them. But 
 the history that gives their records is for the most part history 
 written in times when individualism, as we know it, had at 
 last manifested itself. Zaleukus, Draco, and Lycurgus — three 
 of the earliest recorded statesmen — are generally believed by 
 historical critics to be mythological personages. No true facts 
 of the lives of Zaleukus and Draco are known, and Lycurgus is 
 generally admitted to be an entire myth. Each was rather the 
 convenient centralization in a name of a process of political 
 development. Solon and Peisistratus, on the other hand, were 
 authentic people, but Solon was the mouthpiece of a social 
 movement, and Peisistratus, whatever else he represented, 
 represented also the ideals and policy of an Athenian family. 
 So too, in literature, the earliest poets write for the most part 
 not as individuals but as representatives of times and conditions. 
 Their talent is the only individual thing about them. Tyrtaeus 
 was the poet of triumphant Spartan soldiers. Alkman was the 
 bard of Spartan youth and splendour ; Hesiod of the Boeotian 
 
30 Ancient Greece 
 
 farmers and shepherds. Pindar was the poet of the pageantry 
 of knights and nobles. Even Theognis of Megara, who might 
 well be the exception to the rule, is the poet of exiles. 
 
 It is characteristic too that in these days poetry was for all 
 men to write. The finest ' Songs of the People ' — the Carmina 
 Popularia of the Anthologists — belong to the sixth and early 
 fifth centuries. But generalizations of this nature have their 
 pitfalls, particularly in regard to Greece. If individualism, 
 as we know it to-day, is not the prevailing tendency of Greek 
 life in early times, it does not follow that it never existed in 
 early Greece at all. Lesbos in the sixth century produced 
 a group of poets whose individualism is almost modern. A 
 famous inscription from Sparta of the early fifth century 
 records the athletic prowess of a certain Damonon and his son 
 in terms which, for their egotistic fulsomeness, would be hard 
 to parallel. Yet such people as these were not really character- 
 istic of their age and they scarcely affected the course of its 
 progress and development. 
 
 Sentimentality, which is characteristic of individualism as we 
 know it and which, to be effective, requires a brooding over 
 the past, found no home in Greece for the simple reason that 
 the Greeks were not conscious of their past. The delicate 
 sentimentality of Browning's ' Love among the ruins ' or of 
 the majority of the poems of William Morris finds no echo in 
 early Greece. As modern critics have discovered, the Greeks 
 * saw life steadily and saw it whole ', and there was no place for 
 sentimentality. Even the melancholy and pessimism of so much 
 early Greek poetry is not sentimental. It is simply hard fact — 
 the reflections of delicate minds upon the tragedies that beset 
 them. Such reflections bear no relation to the ' Weltschmerz ' 
 of modern poets. There is courage rather than despair in them. 
 Man is thinking of what he has to face, rather than of what 
 
Ancient Greece 31 
 
 he has lost and regrets — and this, as recent ciitics have shown, 
 is characteristic of Greek thought and literature at its prime. 
 Pericles, in a speech to the parents and relatives of Athenian 
 soldiers killed in battle, dwells not on the past but on the future, 
 
 * Some of you ', he says, ' are at an age when you may hope to 
 have other children, and you ought to bear your sorrows better. 
 Not only will the children who may be born hereafter make 
 you forget your own lost ones, but the city itself will be the 
 gainer,' 
 
 To us this is sheer callousness or else profound cynicism. 
 But to the Greek it was simply his way of facing facts and looking 
 life and death alike in the face, without fear or prejudice, not 
 so much as an individual as the member of a brotherhood. Only 
 at the approach of death itself did he at last look backward 
 with a certain regret that betrays the elements of modern 
 introspection and individualism. 
 
 ' Those who have left the sweet light I bewail no longer, 
 but rather those who live ever in expectation of death ', 
 
 says an unknown Greek poet. This is the gospel of facing 
 facts with a vengeance ; live when you are alive and die when 
 the time comes ; do not live with an eye on the dead past or 
 on death to come. Pericles said no more and no less than 
 this. 
 
 Another unknown poet writes : 
 
 * I was not and I came into existence. I was and now I am no 
 longer. That is all. If any one says otherwise he lies. I shall 
 not be.' 
 
 Here are the same beliefs written by a cynic ; it is easy for 
 the open direct view of the Greek to be interpreted as the 
 irony of a scoffer. 
 
 Just as in history and in literature the individual counts for 
 
32 Ancient Greece 
 
 less than the community, at any rate down to the time when 
 Greece had reached the height of normal development in the 
 first half of the fifth century, so in art the same characteristics are 
 apparent. But our authorities on art almost all date from the 
 fourth century and later, and writers in the fourth century were 
 working in an age when individualism, as we know it, had not 
 only developed but had developed to its fullest extent. The 
 individual whose aims were personal, and who sought rather 
 to impose his own ideas than to develop the latent capacities 
 of the state itself by personal force of character, had made his 
 appearance. The Alcibiades type had succeeded that of a 
 Pericles. Later an Epaminondas had given place to an Alexan- 
 der the Great, the type of whose greatness was seen in the germ 
 in Alcibiades. The whole century, in fact, was coloured with 
 this sort of individualism. So too in art Pheidias, whose 
 achievements were the result of personal genius developing 
 the full possibilities of communal art, had given way to 
 Praxiteles, Scopas, and Lysippus, whose works .eflect personality 
 and individuality in conception and execution alike. Sculpture 
 was beginning to represent not so much ideals as types ; 
 emotions and personal human things rather than cold ambitions 
 and representations of man idealized. Refinements on the 
 personal theme begin to appear as well. To Scopas is attributed 
 a group of three figures, ' Desire, Longing, and Love ', a subtle 
 distinction in representation which only a supremely indivi- 
 dualist artist could produce. 
 
 The fourth century, then, would naturally tend, in writing 
 the history of earlier times, to read into them, to a large extent, 
 its own ideas. Individuality would be given to artists and 
 politicians who had none. Art and politics alike would be 
 thought of as in the hands of ambitious men with strong 
 personal aims. 
 
Ancient Greece 33 
 
 But in fact, as we have seen, the fight against hardship that 
 resulted in the emergence of Hellenism had produced in the 
 seventh and sixth centuries a type whose energies, consciously 
 or unconsciously, aimed at the common good of a unit, of the 
 city, of the commonwealth, of the tribe, of the family, or of 
 the guild. There was no room for the abnormal, for the over- 
 developed, for the unusual, or for the genius, unless he conformed 
 to the common type and aim in his works and in himself. The 
 struggle for existence was too near at hand, the old natural law 
 of mutual aid within a group, of common action for common 
 welfare, still held. Only so had man achieved his position in 
 a world that was still filled with hostile things, bordered by 
 savagery, beset with natural dangers and hardships and with 
 great and possibly hostile empires of the old static type looming 
 in the background like a thundercloud. 
 
 Thus in the early days of Greece the politician was merged 
 in his politics, the poet in his poetry, and the artist in his art. 
 Attica was a union of parishes, tribes, and families ; poetry 
 was of the clan, the state, and the type, and art was of the guild, 
 the school, or the group. 
 
 Thus did the group work in politics, in literature, and in art, 
 varying its nature in each. In politics and in literature the 
 group ideals were crystallized in a single personality. In art 
 the personality was less prominent and the group idea appeared 
 in a style. 
 
 We have seen, then, in the broadest outlines, from what 
 conditions the Greek emerged, under what conditions he 
 developed, and in what direction he was tending. We have seen 
 shortly what tendencies of mind and character he acquired 
 in the process, due both to the various forces acting upon him 
 and to his own reactions in response. The period we have 
 covered is roughly from 1 100 b. c. to 450 b. c. 
 
 2536.4 c 
 
34 Ancient Greece 
 
 II. 
 
 Let us pause for a moment and look at the Greek himself. 
 Let us reconstruct, as far as we can, his ordinary daily life. 
 But this reconstruction must not be for the purpose of drawing 
 comparisons or emphasizing differences between the Greeks 
 and ourselves. We are different from them, it is true. We 
 have centuries of history behind us and have lived in the same 
 land for many generations ; from our earliest times, except for 
 brief interludes in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, we 
 have bred a highly individualized type, usually at the expense 
 of the community. We have drawn on the traditions of many 
 lands for our guidance ; above all we have used the traditions 
 of the Middle East, of Syria, and Judaea. We live in a fertile 
 land where extremes of heat and cold are less marked, and our 
 struggle with the crude forces of nature has been shorter and, 
 on the whole, more successful ; we live in a dark and misty 
 land where the cleansing sunlight is all too rare, and we have 
 acquired the habit of taking a cold dispassionate outlook upon 
 things which people who live in a more volatile climate find 
 hard to maintain. 
 
 On the other hand, we resemble them in much that is of 
 vital importance. We are always face to face with the main 
 problems which beset the Greek in every stage of his history ; 
 though neither they nor we may have succeeded, at least we 
 are always searching for the true social and political virtues ; 
 though we endure the rule of authority and tradition and 
 acknowledge our debts to them, we are always seeking to 
 improve upon them. We have the same ideals of freedom, 
 though, perhaps, different ways of achieving them ; adventure 
 
Ancient Greece 35 
 
 and enterpiise are the characteristics of our own as of the Greek 
 maritime communities. 
 
 And between us and the old empires of Assyrians, Egyptians, 
 Hittites, Cretans, and the rest there lie the differences that 
 separate peoples different in race, development, and ideals ; 
 the similarities are chiefly in externals — similarities of pageantry, 
 of kings, priests, armies, and all such expensive splendours. 
 
 We shall then, perhaps, derive a more useful and a more 
 correct view of Greek ideals and of our own indebtedness to 
 them if, having summarized the history of his development, 
 we study the Greek as he lived, thought, and acted. 
 
 It seems, perhaps, a paradox, but the ancient Greek had 
 nothing which corresponded exactly to what we understand 
 by country life. He lived in the country only in so far as he 
 was unable to live in the town. During invasions the scattered 
 country population gravitated to the towns and sought safety 
 behind the walls — as, for example, at the commencement of 
 the Peloponnesian war. In times of peace the countryman 
 earned his livelihood and spent most of his time on his farm 
 or on his fields, but his real life, his existence as a member of 
 the social unit, was in the towns, Thither he came in to vote 
 and legislate. The country voters at Epidaurus were called 
 - Dusty-feet ' because they had far to come from the outlying 
 farmsteads to the city. The farmers of the central plains of 
 Attica trudged for a four-hour climb over Hymettos to Athens 
 to record their votes. 
 
 The type of countryman was twofold. He was either a 
 farmer or mountaineer shepherd, the distinction of types being 
 as sharp as the distinction of the lands which held each type, 
 between the flat plainland that starts where the mountain 
 abruptly ends and the rugged pine-covered mountains them- 
 selves. The mountaineer shepherd wa^ essentially a nomad. 
 
 e 2 
 
36 Ancient Greece 
 
 In the depths of the short sharp winter that is so characteristic 
 of Greece he and his flocks would hardly stir from the shanty 
 where man and beast lived together. 
 
 ' Heaven rains,' says Alcaeus, ' a great storm comes out of 
 the sky, and frozen are the streams. Cast out winter ! pile high 
 the fire, fill up the cup with wine without stint, and wrap a soft 
 hood round your head.' 
 
 It was at the approach of seasons like this that the Attic shepherd 
 would place offerings on the shrines of Rainy Zeus which lay 
 on the summits of Hymettos and Parnes. The Greek, like most 
 other Mediterranean peoples, endures cold as unhappily as we 
 endure heat. Heat was, in fact, considered the normal thing, 
 the ordinary condition of an active life. There is a Greek word 
 meaning ' to bring up in the shade ', which is used invariably 
 in a sense of scorn, implying effeminacy. 1 It strikes curiously 
 on our ears. It is remarkable that in Greek history and litera- 
 ture we hear only a little of the discomforts of heat, while 
 those of the winter bulk large. A seventeenth-century transla- 
 tion of a Greek romance 2 gives us the setting of a Greek winter: 
 
 1 And now winter was come on . . . for on a sudden there fell 
 a great snow, which blinded all the paths, stopped up all the 
 ways, and shut up all the shepherds and husbandmen. The 
 torrents rushed down in flood, and the lakes were frozen and 
 glazed with crystal. The hedges and trees looked as if they had 
 bin breaking down. . . . And therefore no man drove out his 
 flocks to pasture or did so much as come out of the door, but 
 about the cock's crowing made the fires nose-high, and some 
 spun flax, some wove tarpaulin for the sea, others with all their 
 sophistry made gins and nets and traps for birds. At that 
 time their care was employed about the oxen and cows that 
 were foddered with chaff in the stalls, about the goats and 
 about the sheep which fed on green leaves in the sheepcotes 
 
 1 Compare the use of the Latin word umbraticus. 
 
 2 Daphnis and CbJoe (Geoige Thornley's translation), Book III, ch. 3. 
 
Ancient Greece 37 
 
 and the folds, or else about fatting their hogs in the sties with 
 acorns and other mast.' 
 
 Winter was thus a thing to be borne in patience. A Greek 
 winter is sudden and violent. A sudden swift gale on a sunny 
 day in January will bring great cloudbanks from the north ; 
 a sharp fall in temperature, and the next day all the hills are 
 covered with snow. Three weeks or a month of biting wind, 
 lashing rainstorms, and perhaps more snow ; then suddenly 
 the sun comes blazing out in the crisp air. A little frost and 
 then at last the earth softens, the anemones and wild narcissus, 
 crocuses and rock-hyacinths come out, and here is the spring. 
 The shepherd emerges with his flocks to the places where the 
 fresh green grass has already started sprouting and the wild 
 olives and other shrubs are taking on a new lease of life. The 
 sheep will eat the former and the goats the latter, with anything 
 else they can find. The shepherd has dogs, but their duty is 
 to guard the flock, not to guide it. This latter the shepherd 
 does himself with his voice or his pipe or by clapping his hands. 
 I have seen shepherds in Greece controlling their flocks in these 
 ways to-day. One old experienced shepherd explained to me 
 that when he has his sheep and goats together in the same flock 
 he employs one series of cries for the sheep and another for 
 the goats in order to make the flock move as he wishes. What 
 is probably a rather exaggerated description of the same process 
 is to be found in Dapbnis and Chloe, in which, with all its 
 affectations and posturing, there is a strain of the real old Greek 
 country life : 
 
 ' First he blowed scmething that was low and smart ', says 
 the same translator, ' and presently the goats rose up and held 
 their heads bolt upright. Then he played the pastoral or 
 grazing tune, and the goats cast their heads downwards to 
 graze. Then again he breathed a note was soft and sweet, and 
 
38 Ancient Greece 
 
 all lay down together to rest. Anon he struck up a sharp, 
 violent, tumultuous sound, and they all rushed into the wood as 
 if a wolf had come upon them. After a while he piped aloud 
 the recall, and they wheeled out of the wood again and came 
 up to his very feet. Never was there any master of a house 
 that had his servants so obsequious to his commands.' 1 
 
 It reminds us of sheepdog trials in Wales or Scotland. 
 
 Up in the hills there were wolves to guard against, and on the 
 coast care had to be taken lest the kids and lambs fell into the 
 sea. Then there were snakes or eagles ever ready to snatch off 
 the unweaned or the lost. 
 
 In the early summer in May and June the sheep have to be 
 driven into the towns to be sold. As summer advances the 
 shepherd drives his flock into the upland plains and high 
 plateaux round the mountain tops, like the plains on Parnassus 
 above Delphi, or the high meadows of Parnes and Pelion, or the 
 dells and hollows of the Arcadian hills. Here he spends the 
 summer, sleeping at nights with his flock in the open with his 
 fur garments for warmth and a fire to sleep by. So to-day on 
 a summer's night the sides of the hills in Greece are lit up with 
 shepherds' fires sparkling in the dark. 
 
 The husbandman, unlike the shepherd, lives all the year in 
 a smaller area — the area of his farm. He has his vines and his 
 trees to tend, each a thing of age and value, for in this dry land 
 trees and vines do not spring up in a year or so. An olive tree 
 needs twenty years to attain its full growth and a vine at least 
 four or five. So when invaders came their first aim was to 
 1 waste their enemies' lands ', and the wasting of lands took the 
 form of cutting down the trees and hacking up the vines. The 
 Turks so ravaged Greek lands a hundred years ago, and so too 
 Archidamus, the stern old Spartan king, came every year to 
 
 1 Book IV, ch. 15. 
 
" - *-, 
 
 A^SS^ 
 
 
 <* ; 
 
 
 
 -jfe-il— 
 
 i 
 
 .fflflr 
 
40 Ancient Greece 
 
 waste the lands of Attica. When he paseed the little city of 
 Plataea, an old ally of Athens, he offered it immunity from the 
 ravages of war if it would be neutral. To ensure its neutrality 
 it was to supply him with an inventory of all its property, 
 particularly its trees, and when the war was over it could claim 
 compensation if anything recorded in the inventory had 
 suffered damage. 1 
 
 ' How many vines have you got ? ' a Greek farmer from 
 Euboea is asked. 2 ' There are two before the door,' he replies, 
 ' and twenty inside the yard and twenty again on the other 
 side of the river. Splendid vines they are and bear enormous 
 clusters if only the passers-by leave them alone.' 
 
 The rest of this farmer's stock consisted of eight she-goats, 
 a cow with a calf, four sickles, four mattocks, three spears, 
 and a hunting knife ; three bushels of wheat, five of barley, 
 five of millet, and a gallon of beans. Not much this for a fully 
 equipped farm in fertile Euboea. Yet we can take it as typical 
 of the small Greek farmer, who had always before him the fear 
 of a bad harvest, of the ruin of invasion, or of winter storm or 
 summer forest fire. If nature was conquered, the victory was 
 always a Pyrrhic one and the enemy reserves were as yet 
 unbeaten. 
 
 Even if all prospered, and his corn was garnered, it was 
 a meagre crop at the best, and the means of garnering it were 
 primitive. A stone-paved threshing floor and a few flails ; at 
 best a wooden sledge with flints set in the under side served to 
 separate corn from chaff, pulled by a horse or ox and with the 
 heaviest member of the family standing on the sledge. Such 
 contrivances they use to-day and such they used in antiquity. 
 ' She drove her oxen about the floor to break the ears very small 
 
 1 See Thucydides, ii. 72. 
 
 2 Dio Chrysostom, Oration VII, 108. 
 
Ancient Greece 41 
 
 and slip out the grain, with her hurdle set with sharp stones,' 
 says the writer of Daphnis and Chloe. 1 
 
 No wonder that Achilles thought that the lot of a labourer 
 was the hardest lot on earth. 
 
 But with autumn come many fruits that need but little 
 tending, and life in September and October becomes easier. 
 But like the Greek winter the Greek autumn is short. To the 
 outward eye it hardly exists at all, for few of the trees of Greece 
 are deciduous. The plane, the oak, and the poplar alone shed 
 their leaves and get autumn tints : but they grow only in valleys 
 and along rivers. For the bulk of the trees of the landscape are 
 pines, which in autumn put forth their new green sprouts and 
 make one think that it is spring. 
 
 Of the spiritual life of these country folk we know little. 
 When they came into the towns they would certainly visit the 
 great shrines of the gods and join in the festival and processions. 
 But in the country there were few temples and only small 
 shrines of gods and heroes along the roads. Some of these were 
 of gods who counted more in the country districts, such as 
 Rainy Zeus, Hecate of the Three Ways, or Hermes. But there 
 were also the rites of certain dark and fearsome deities. In 
 Arcadia there is the mysterious pool of Pheneus that rises and 
 sinks in its bed, so that one year it is a marsh and the next 
 a lake. Here, says Pausanias, 2 the people used to celebrate 
 what they called the ? Greater Mysteries ', in which the priest 
 put on a mask and smote the ' Underground Folk ' with rods. 
 Then there is a hill in Arcadia on the summit of which there 
 was a sanctuary of certain gods called the Pure. ' Here it is 
 customary to take a most solemn oath, but the people either 
 do not know or will not divulge the names of these gods.' 3 
 
 1 Book III. ch. 30. 2 viii. 15. 
 
 3 Pausanias, viii. 44. 
 
42 Ancient Greece 
 
 The Greek countryman, like all peasants, had, too, his rigid 
 codes and formulae. This brought bad luck and that good. 
 
 * Never cross the sweet flowing water of ever rolling rivers 
 on foot,' says Hesiod, * unless you have prayed, gazing into the 
 soft flood, and washed your hands in the clear lovely water. 
 Whoever crosses a river with hands unwashed of wickedness, 
 the gods are angry with him and bring trouble upon him after- 
 wards.' * 
 
 There is something sacrilegious about cutting the flow of 
 a stream, for a stream is symbolic of life and change. ■ You 
 will never step into the same stream twice ', said Heracleitus 
 the sage. 2 
 
 All kinds of pulse are the sacred gift of Demeter to men, 
 except beans, which are unclean, said the Arcadians. 3 Empe- 
 docles, the mystic, it was said, called the bean his brother ! 
 
 But the real gods of the country were few in number. Chief 
 of them were Pan and the Nymphs, a contrast of opposites 
 like Beauty and the Beast. Pan to the shepherd and farmer 
 was the real country god, guardian of goats, the keeper of the 
 hill-tops, jovial, cheerful, and human. The Nymphs were the 
 guardians of waters, trees, and mountains ; there were Dryads 
 of the trees, Naiads of springs and streams, Oreiads of the hills, 
 and Epimeliads 4 — an unknown kind. All about Greece are 
 caves and grottos sacred to Pan and the Nymphs, or some- 
 times to the Nymphs alone. On Hymettus and on Parnes, near 
 Marathon, and on Parnassus are caves of Pan and the Nymphs, 
 or sometimes of the Nymphs alone or of Oreiads. Near 
 Pharsalus in Thessaly is another in which a hymn to the Centaur 
 Cheiron and the Nymphs was found, inscribed on the rock. 
 
 In all these caves were humble dedications, often illiterate, 
 
 1 Works and Days, 737-41. 2 Fragments 41, 42. 
 
 3 Pausanias, viii. 15. 4 See Pausanias, viii. 4, 2. 
 
Ancient Greece 43 
 
 and small offerings or, at the most, small sculptured reliefs and 
 figures. This humble worship meant something very real to 
 the mountaineers of Greece. They were giving offerings to 
 what they thought of as the spirits of their surroundings. The 
 rocks and the springs and the trees are there and are good; they 
 are surely the property and the habitation of some one — hence 
 the Nymphs and Pan, who never become abstractions or even 
 personifications. They are just simply the owners of lands 
 where man is only an intruder. 
 
 From these simple hard-working men the strength of the 
 Greek city was derived. They brought their herds and fruits 
 into the towns, they joined up and served as soldiers when called 
 upon, and they voted and legislated with the rest. 
 
 Of life in the town we know, curiously enough, not very 
 much more than of life in the country, except that it had more 
 variety. It varies, of course, from town to town. Life in 
 Sparta was radically different from life in Athens or Thebes, 
 and life in Corinth was different from either. We get glimpses 
 of town life from the dialogues of Plato, of Lucian, or of 
 Xenophon which are more lively and realistic than we can get 
 from a mere repiecing of the towns themselves or from any 
 patchwork account of Greek life. The chief and most important 
 thing about town life was the community of existence. People 
 were continually meeting. Life was not an alternation of 
 office and home as it is with so many families to-day. Work 
 was mainly done in the open air or in the public buildings ; the 
 house was for sleeping, eating, and entertaining one's friends. 
 Rest and leisure were for the open air ; there were all the 
 public temples, terraces, and halls in which to rest or talk during 
 the heat of the day. The distinction between public and 
 private was not so marked. The temples and halls were public 
 only in so far as they represented the ambitions of the com- 
 
44 Ancient Greece 
 
 munity as a whole ; they were the product of the will and the 
 energy of individuals. The same man that sat in the shade of 
 some temple or hall had perhaps voted for its erection and paid 
 his contribution towards it. There were no dim abstractions 
 like county councils, that by a brief edict could make some 
 mushroom growth to spring up in the city. Public buildings and 
 their adornments were the product of social aims and ideals 
 rather than of civic needs or religious movements. The old 
 temple of Athena on the Acropolis of Athens was the earliest of 
 the large shrines of Athens, put up in the time of Solon or earlier, 
 before the people of Attica were affected by the influences of 
 other lands. They were simple Attic folk, and their buildings 
 reflect their simplicity. Then Peisistratus burst on the scene 
 with his new ambitions and new ideas. He renovated the old 
 temple of Athena and erected an imposing colonnade round it, 
 and gave it finer and better sculptures to adorn it. Then later 
 Peisistratus died, and his sons, who interpreted his position 
 in a personal and narrow way, were disposed of, the one by 
 assassination, the other by exile. The democracy of Athens 
 had reasserted itself. It celebrated its new activity by starting 
 to build a new temple, greater and finer in every way than that 
 adorned by Peisistratus. The vast and rather pretentious 
 temple of Olympian Zeus, started by Peisistratus, was left in 
 neglect, unfinished and forgotten. But before the new temple 
 of the democracy was finished the storm-cloud of Persia broke, 
 and all was swept away. After the defeat and dispersal of the 
 Persians the democracy, triumphant once more, set to work to 
 remake its shattered glory. But even the earlier beginnings 
 of the preceding revival were swept away : it was a generation 
 confident of its own ability for the future. A still newer temple 
 was started, and the unfinished beginnings of the other were 
 used as building material for its walls. At last a new temple 
 
Ancient Greece 45 
 
 was achieved, the Parthenon, the ruins of which are the glory 
 of Athens to-day. Such was the history of one sanctuary, but 
 nearly all the others have similar histories behind them. The 
 Erechtheium, the little temple of Athena Nike, and the entrance 
 gates to the Acropolis itself were each built as the result of 
 certain movements, half social, half political. To imagine 
 similar conditions to-day would be difficult and almost comic ; 
 but if we can conceive a certain party after a success at the 
 elections putting up a new War Office or a new Board of 
 Education as a kind of thank-offering, with the cordial approval 
 of all London, we shall be in a po:ition to understand, rather 
 vaguely perhaps, what went to make up ancient civic spirit, 
 and to realize how in ancient times politics and town-planning 
 often went hand in hand. The main differences between 
 ourselves and the Greeks in these matters is that the Greeks 
 owned their public buildings in a way in which we cannot do. 
 They knew personally the architect and the sculptor or some 
 other person connected with the work, for the world was very 
 small, and every one could watch what every one else was doing. 
 They could watch the building grow under the architect's 
 hands. If they objected to it for some reason they could step 
 in and prevent its completion, as they did in the case of the 
 Propylaea at Athens, which was commenced by Mnesicles and 
 never finished according to his plans. 
 
 Public buildings thus represented public ideals in a closer 
 and more satisfactory way than ever happens to-day. We only 
 become articulate in opposition. Some building is proposed 
 that meets with universal ridicule. In such cases building can 
 be stopped by the sheer force of public opinion. But the bulk 
 of the people are not interested. The origination on the part 
 of the public of ideas for building does not exist. Perhaps this 
 is because the capacity of the age for producing style in building, 
 
46 Ancient Greece 
 
 as in furniture and the minor arts and crafts, has vanished. 
 A hundred years hence what will be understood by the ' George 
 Vth style of architecture ' ? what will a ' George Vth ' chair 
 or spoon be like ? But style died early in the reign of Queen 
 Victoria. Public taste, never vigorous, is getting weaker and 
 weaker, and our only salvation is that we may have men of 
 taste in influential positions who can control tendencies and 
 movements in architecture and the arts and crafts. 
 
 Athens we take, as a rule, as a standard type of a Greek city. 
 But this is unsafe. Athens openly and admittedly had more 
 than her fair share of beauty and public adornment. Thucy- 
 dides, thinking, as he always did, of posterity and its verdict, 
 makes a prophecy which has literally come true. 1 
 
 ' Suppose ', he says, ' the city of Sparta to be deserted, and 
 nothing left but the temples and the ground plan, distant ages 
 would be very unwilling to believe that the power of the 
 Lacedaemonians was at all equal to their fame. And yet they 
 own two-fifths of the Peloponnesus and are acknowledged 
 leaders of the whole, as well as of numerous allies in the rest 
 of Hellas. But their city is not regularly built and has no 
 splendid temples or other edifices ; it resembles rather a 
 straggling village, like the ancient towns of Hellas, and would 
 therefore make a poor show. Whereas if the same fate befell 
 the Athenians the ruins of Athens would strike the eye, and we 
 should infer their power to have been twice as great as it 
 really is.' 
 
 The truth of this criticism must strike any one who has seen 
 the two sites. The remains of Sparta are so insignificant that 
 it is only with the greatest difficulty that one can recognize 
 the ancient site at all. The Acropolis of Athens, with its 
 marble buildings, can be seen from twenty miles away. 
 
 There can be read, however, into Thucydides' remark the 
 
 1 i. 10. 
 
< 
 
 XL 
 
 < 
 
 o 
 
48 Ancient Greece 
 
 suggestion that Sparta had never risen above the condition of 
 a straggling village. This would be a misconception. As has 
 already been hinted, Sparta in the seventh and part of the 
 eighth century b. c. was undoubtedly the leading city of 
 Hellas. Recent excavation has amply confirmed this view. In 
 the days of the poet Alkman the town was a centre of culture. 
 Music and singing, choirs and bands of dancers were there. 
 Artists, sculptors, potters, and craftsmen plied their trades. 
 There was gold from Lydia and rich eastern embroideries, and 
 the strangers who brought them thronged the streets. Up on 
 the little acropolis was a group of small but rich shrines, in 
 which that of Athena, guardian of the city, was the chief. 
 Below, on the banks of the Eurotas, was the curious shrine of 
 Artemis Orthia, where strange rites were performed. Scattered 
 around were numerous other shrines and sanctuaries. The 
 nature of the people and the general atmosphere of the place 
 were as different as one could imagine from Athens ; yet the 
 Sparta of those days was no mean city. 
 
 But early in the sixth century b. c. the Spartans appear to 
 have undergone something in the nature of a puritanic revival. 
 Culture and luxury are banished, strangers expelled, and 
 foreign relations confined to the most formal of alliances. 
 It was a nationalist revival such as most states pass through 
 at some time in their history. The old Dorian strain was 
 reasserting itself in the face of the degenerating influences from 
 outside. Thus came the end of Spartan art and literature. 
 We hear no more of either. Only the severe elements remained, 
 and the Sparta of the Histories of Herodotus and Thucydides 
 is a hard grim place where beauty of building and public 
 adornment was limited and restricted. Only the old shrines 
 still remained, and the town well deserved the description of 
 a ' straggling village '. It was managed as though under 
 
Ancient Greece 49 
 
 martial law and all semblance of family life or of ordinary 
 comforts eliminated. Boys were taken from their mothers 
 before the age of seven and trained in state schools until they 
 were nine. From the age of ten to thirteen they were still 
 undergoing state training and were made to go in for tests of 
 endurance and skill. These contests were held in the shrine 
 of Artemis before an audience of friends and relations. The 
 winner received as a prize nothing more precious than a steel 
 sickle, which he had to dedicate to the goddess. 1 Music entered 
 also into these contests. But the most severe of all the tests 
 which the children had to undergo was that of the ' ordeal by 
 lash ', a test of endurance of a brutal and savage nature. 
 
 Between this grim stern city and the light-hearted city of 
 Athens there was a gap which was never bridged. The fierce 
 invader from the north who halted at last at Sparta could never 
 forget that he was a conqueror ; the life-loving, generous 
 Athenian made it his boast, on the other hand, that he had 
 neither conquered nor been conquered, and that he let the 
 soul find its own wings. 
 
 ' We rely', said Pericles, 2 'not upon management and trickery 
 but upon our own hearts and hands. In the matter of education, 
 whereas the Spartans, from early youth, are always undergoing 
 laborious exercises which are designed to make them brave, 
 we live at ease and yet are equally ready to face the perils that 
 they face.' 
 
 Finally it is often a matter of wonder that with all the 
 temples and shrines that existed in a city like Athens so little 
 is heard of religion in the sense in which we understand the 
 word. It is remarkable that in the whole of the Funeral Speech 
 
 1 Some of these sickles, fastened to the dedicatory tablets, have been found 
 at Sparta. The more cruel contests may have originated later. 
 
 2 Thucydides, ii. 39. 
 
 2536.4 D 
 
50 Ancient Greece 
 
 of Pericles there is no mention of religion, of the future life, 
 or of the fate of the dead over whom the oration is being held. 
 The whole of the speech looks to the front, as it were, and takes 
 a pitilessly realistic view of things. The dead are dead, and that 
 is the end of them. They have done their part and contributed 
 to the glory of the living. Let the living comfort themselves 
 by looking back on the happiness that they have already had. 
 
 There is no religion here except the religion of Humanity ; 
 no seeking after God or an existence beyond the grave. It is 
 the creed of mankind consciously at the summit of its develop- 
 ment, of a mankind proud of and satisfied with its achievements 
 and meeting its deficiencies not with pride nor yet with 
 humility but with the steady gaze of perfect control. Pericles 
 may have been a rationalist, he may have scorned the religious 
 observances of his time — but he built the Parthenon. Had 
 his speech been delivered to-day he would have been clamor- 
 ously condemned as an atheist. Yet we have no record that 
 his speech brought anything but comfort to his hearers. At 
 any rate he remained in powei for some time after its delivery. 
 He was, in short, voicing the opinions of the average Athenian. 
 
 We shall not be far wrong, then, in thinking that the city 
 Greek of the fifth century b. c. accepted his gods in a spirit of 
 reasonable criticism. Their temples were the adornment of 
 his city, the work of his hands. It was he who lived near them 
 and saw their beauty and benefited from it. In so far as they 
 were monuments erected to the glory of the gods the tradi- 
 tions of his race were being carefully observed, and he was 
 glad. 
 
 All the time it is the man who counts ; always it is Humanity 
 which is really the deity that is worshipped. 
 
 If cities varied largely in nature and if, in the different states, 
 the most different kinds of one general type of Humanity were 
 
THE PARTHENON 
 
 D 2 
 
52 Ancient Greece 
 
 produced, there still remained one unifying factor that affected 
 all Greek states without exception — the sea. 
 
 Throughout Greek history there is no Greek city or province 
 which did not to a very large extent make its actions, if not its 
 ideals, conform to maritime conditions. By this I do not mean 
 that each state either aimed at or achieved having a navy ; 
 I refer rather to the wider influences of sea-coast life. The only 
 marked exception to this generalization seems to be Arcadia, 
 which is given special prominence in the Homeric catalogue of 
 the ships that went to Troy. Agamemnon, says Homer, had 
 given them ships because, while good warriors, the Arcadians 
 1 cared not for the things of the sea '. 1 
 
 The effect of sea-coast life upon the Greeks was marked and 
 complex. We who know, however indirectly, the effects of 
 maritime conditions, the limitations and advantages of insu- 
 larity, can, perhaps, the more appreciate the Greek position. 
 Mobility and vulnerability were, perhaps, the chief character- 
 istics which Greek states acquired from the sea : mobility, in 
 that a city could remove its citizens en bloc to another sphere ; 
 vulnerability, in that whatever a city did could hardly be kept 
 hidden from the rest of the world, and an enemy with a more 
 powerful navy could, at any time, make a descent upon it and, 
 if need be, destroy it. Phocaea, when Harpagus the Mede was 
 at its gates, got into its ships and sailed away for distant Corsica 
 — there to start afresh. Many of the Ionian cities founded 
 themselves anew on the north coast of the Aegean or in the 
 far west. Teos established its replica at Abdera, and Maroneia 
 on the Thracian coast was also Ionian. Samos migrated to 
 Zancle in Sicily, whither also had gone Messenian refugees from 
 the Peloponnese, driven out by the Spartans. The whole 
 North Aegean and Italian coasts were, in effect, a home for 
 1 Iliad, ii. 6n. 
 
Ancient Greece 53 
 
 refugees from the cities of Asia Minor. Time and time again 
 in Greek history a city on the coast packs up its goods and moves 
 to some more prosperous or more peaceful region. 
 
 Colonies were thus, in many ways, the same in origin. They 
 were not, however, so much the re-establishment of a home on 
 the part of oppressed peoples as the means of relieving the 
 pressure of increased population. But there were many types 
 of colony. Some were mere commercial enterprises, others 
 political ventures, others of purely military importance. The 
 remote city of Gelonus in the frosty Caucasus, built of wood, 
 surrounded by a stockade and inhabited, as Herodotus says, 1 
 by a Hellenic people who were trappers and hunted otters and 
 beavers, is surely the farthest eastern settlement of early Greek 
 enterprise. Tartessus in Spain is perhaps the farthest west ; 
 thither certain Phocaeans once sailed in fifty-oared vessels. 2 
 The wise king of Tartessus, reputed to be a hundred and 
 twenty years of age, liked them and begged them to stay and 
 dwell there wheresoever they wished ; but they would not 
 leave their home in Ionia. Nevertheless the king, hearing of 
 the danger that threatened the Ionian cities from the Medes, 
 offered the Phocaeans a sum of money to enable them to 
 build a city wall. This same city of Tartessus was at another 
 time visited by a storm-driven ship from Samos. ' Tartessus 
 was at that time ', says Herodotus, ' a virgin market, and so they 
 made from their cargo a profit greater than any other Hellenes 
 of whom we have certain knowledge.' The historian does not 
 say what merchandise it was that made so great a profit, but 
 we can guess, not without reason, ^that it was Spanish silver, 
 for Diodorus tells of ships of the Phoenicians that, sailing to 
 these parts, brought back so much of the metal that they made 
 their very anchors of it, 
 
 1 iv. 108, 2 Herodotus, i, 163. 
 
54 Ancient Greece 
 
 Thus from the earliest days Greeks were seafarers who, 
 whether by accident or by design, reached the uttermost ends 
 of the known world and looked out upon the unknown Atlantic 
 from Cadiz or on the Indian Ocean from Egypt. Sheer 
 enterprise alone took them to the places they reached. But 
 it must not be thought that they were either born sailors or 
 that they picked up their knowledge here and there. 
 
 ' Maritime skill ', says Pericles * to the Athenians, the most 
 expert sailors of his day, ' is like skill of other kinds, not a thing 
 to be cultivated by the way or at odd times. It is jealous of any 
 other pursuit which distracts the mind for an instant from 
 itself . . . even you yourselves, who have been practising ever 
 since the Persian war, are not yet perfect.' 
 
 But in estimating the importance of the sea in Greek life 
 we must remember how much the Mediterranean and in 
 particular the Aegean differ from our own North Sea. Subject 
 to sudden and violent tempests at all times of year its navigation 
 by sailing-ships has always been difficult. In the summer 
 months there is the least chance of storms, but the rocky 
 promontories that project into it create serious difficulties of 
 atmosphere and current. Athos and Olympus are storm centres 
 in the hottest days of August ; the clouds collect from nowhere 
 and thunderstorms burst from their midst. The famous Doro 
 channel between Euboea and Andros is impassable to small 
 steamships, even in a moderate gale from the north. They 
 have to bide their time in the shelter of Carystus Bay. The 
 notorious Hollows of Euboea have seen many a wreck, and the 
 Euripus, with its six-mile-an-hour current that changes its 
 direction six times in twenty-four hours, is now as great a risk 
 as it always was. But the dangers of the Aegean are for the 
 most part local, and our own North Sea would be far more 
 
 1 Thucydides, i. 142. 
 

 < 
 w 
 
 O 
 PQ 
 
 W 
 
 Q 
 
 CO 
 
 o 
 
56 Ancient Greece 
 
 formidable to the sailor unprovided with the advantages of 
 a thousand years of nautical experience. 
 
 Still to the Greeks the sea meant freedom — freedom to go 
 whither they wished, freedom to exchange the benefits of 
 culture and commerce, freedom to move unrestrained by the 
 mountain barriers and narrow passes that confined the lands- 
 man. So in Greek history men and movements, commerce 
 and politics, culture and ambition are conditioned by this one 
 factor ; the veterans of the Ten Thousand who, on reaching the 
 coast near Trebizond, raised the cry of ' The Sea ! the Sea ! ' 
 and wept with joy at the sight of it, did so because they knew 
 that it meant to them freedom and home, because it was 
 something that they understood — in a word their element. 
 
 Conversely the effect of the peaceful spread of Hellenic 
 culture by commerce and exploration upon the people whom 
 it reached was very great. The most distant parts of Europe 
 absorbed Greek ideas and Greek civilization in a remarkable 
 way. We learn from Strabo, 1 who quotes the earlier historian 
 Ephorus, that in the west the peoples of Iberia, from Cadiz to 
 the coast of France were * lovers of the Greeks ', Philhellenes. 
 Diodorus 2 tells us that ' the inhabitants of that part of 
 Britain which is called Belerion are very fond of strangers and 
 from their intercourse with foreign merchants are civilized in 
 their mode of life '. Occasional Greek objects are found in 
 Britain, the latest discovery having just been made this year 
 in the very centre of London — a Greek gold ornament of the 
 fifth century B.C. — below the Roman level. In France they 
 are more common, especially in the Somme region and in the 
 Jura and Provence. Still more appear in the Moselle and Saar 
 valleys and along the upper Rhine. Many other traces of 
 Greek commerce are to be found in the west, and it seems clear 
 1 iv. 199. 8 v. 22. 
 
Ancient Greece 57 
 
 that trade was established there by the Greeks in the sixth 
 century B.C. or even earlier. Two main trade routes seem to 
 have been used ; one ran from Marseilles and Narbonne via 
 Corbilo on the Loire to Brittany and thence to the Isle of 
 Wight and the North. The other went northwards directly 
 across France to the Seine. The tin-mines of Britain were the 
 objective of each of these routes. 
 
 The total effect of all these influences of commerce and 
 enterprise upon the semi-barbarous provinces of Britain, France, 
 and Germany was immense. Greek seems to have been in use 
 in Gaul and in Germany fairly extensively during the last 
 two centuries before Christ. A large majority of the extant 
 Celtic inscriptions of Gaul are written in Greek characters, 
 while at least four of the princes of northern Gaul used Greek 
 for the inscriptions on their coins. The use of Greek in these 
 parts persisted for some time. Julius Caesar, after defeating 
 the Helvetii, found in their camp a nominal roll of all the men 
 of the tribe capable of bearing arms written in Greek. In the 
 lower Rhine valley, near Cologne, Greek inscriptions are found 
 and Greek legends persisted. 
 
 In the north-east the great Hellenic trading stations in and 
 near the Crimea led to an artistic and cultural intercourse 
 between Greeks and Scythians on an extensive scale at an early 
 date. In the south Greek influences are perceptible as near 
 the Equator as Meroe, near Khartoum, a town known to Homer 
 and Herodotus. 
 
 Eastwards little that was Greek penetrated before the time of 
 Alexander the Great, and he led his Greeks to regions to which 
 neither Greek nor Barbarian of the Mediterranean had ever 
 ventured before and to which since his day few have penetrated. 
 It is remarkable that since Alexander led his army back to 
 Babylon across the forbidding and desolate coast-lands of the 
 
.58 Ancient Greece 
 
 Indian Ocean south of Baluchistan, no known traveller had 
 seen those parts again until a. d. 1809. The effects of the 
 introduction of things Hellenic by Alexander into the fast- 
 nesses of Central Asia were immense and lasting. He planted 
 colonies as he went and left detachments of Greeks to control 
 and organize them. In the face of the snowy barrier of the 
 Pamirs and on the banks of the Indus Alexander left the 
 indelible traces of his people. For centuries after Indian 
 princes and provinces bore testimony to the way in which 
 Hellenic traditions had, at the least, captured the fancy of Indian 
 artists and moulded their art. The sculptures of Northern India 
 and the coinage of the Bactrian kings are, for many generations, 
 moulded on Greek lines, and local deities are in many cases 
 identified in artistic tradition with Greek deities such as 
 Athena and Herakles. Even in distant China there are faint 
 echoes of Greek art and Greek influences, chiefly in the time 
 of the Han dynasty. 
 
 But it was rather the humble Greek sailor than the great 
 generals who carried the gospel of Greek culture more per- 
 manently into the remote corners of the known world. It was 
 the sailor who started from his city harbour upon voyages that 
 in those days were as difficult and formidable as those of Drake 
 or Cook in later times, when navigation was a more highly 
 developed thing, who achieved the real spread of Hellenism. 
 Of such men we have but rare records. The Greek Anthology 
 preserves many an epitaph of men who started on their voyages 
 and never reached their destinations. Other records of these 
 humble explorers are hard to find, but the dangers they risked 
 and the fears that beset them still remain enshrined in two 
 places in the Mediterranean to bring vividly before us the 
 danger of maritime enterprise in those days. In the little 
 island of Proti on the stormy western shore of the Peloponnese 
 
Ancient Greece 59 
 
 is a rough natural harbour on whose cliffs storm-bound mariners 
 scratched their prayers for a ' Good voyage '. At a similar 
 harbour in the island of Syra in the Cyclades the cliffs are 
 covered with countless inscriptions of the same type covering 
 a vast period of time from Hellenic to Christian days. The 
 earlier Greek prays to ' Gentle Herakles ', to ' Gentle Askle- 
 pios ', or to ' the Sun '. The later Christian prays in the same 
 way, but to St. Phokas, patron saint of sailors, and to Christ 
 himself. Of the latter inscriptions nearly fifty are still visible. 
 The continuity of this shrine-harbour from Hellenic to 
 Christian times, with the deity alone changing, is testimony to 
 the ever-present dangers that beset the humble sailors of the 
 Aegean. 
 
 The material surroundings and the setting of Greek life have 
 been described. The influence of material Greek life upon the 
 outside world has been demonstrated. The subjective reaction 
 of the Greek upon his setting was, as with every other nation, 
 largely affected by the setting itself. The clear air and the 
 bright sun stimulated his mind. The variation of the climate 
 without serious extremes kept him active. Recent scientific 
 research suggests that the effect of a climate where storms 
 are frequent is beneficial and that the stimulation that results 
 leads to the increase of activity and the production of a good 
 type. 1 Static empires and static climates seem, on the other 
 hand, for the most part to be found together ; where intense 
 cold and intense heat prevail during the greater part of the 
 year man is compelled to work out for himself a rigid and 
 monotonous scheme of domestic economy and there is little 
 scope for the unconventional or the unusual. 
 
 Generalizations of this type are at all times dangerous, but 
 
 1 See Elsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, Introduction. 
 
6o Ancient Greece 
 
 to a very large extent they are valid, and some valuable results 
 may be derived from them. If they are as true as those who 
 formulate them suggest, we have in them a basis for the study 
 of history of exceptional value. Geology and meteorology may 
 be able to fill the gaps where history is silent or inarticulate. 
 
 But without laying too much stress upon the influence 
 of the 'material setting ' of Greek history upon Greek modes 
 of thought and expression we can, perhaps, examine cursorily 
 the modes of thought and expression themselves and derive 
 from them what is, after all, the kernel of the whole problem — 
 the subjective point of view of the Greek and his way of 
 thinking, his hopes and fears, his attitude to the problems of 
 morality, his behaviour in the face of death, and his view of 
 death itself, in a word, the characteristic Greek outlook. 
 
 Of the religion of the Athenian of the middle of the fifth 
 century b. c. we have already spoken. The countryman had his 
 shrines, his local heroes, his rural gods, and his superstitious 
 background of rules and canons which he shares in common 
 with the countrymen of all ages and all climes. The man of the 
 city also had his shrines and hero-cults and greater temples. 
 How large and how varied was the number of these is shown 
 clearly in the account of Greek town and country life given by 
 the traveller Pausanias. What strikes the reader of such records 
 is the amazing variety of religion in those days. Men could 
 worship any sort or kind of deity they wished. At the same 
 time they were not under the necessity of worshipping any. 
 
 The history and composition of Greek religion is far too vast 
 and complex a subject to summarize here. I can only indicate 
 its nature and effects. 
 
 The variety of Greek religion is, perhaps, the most remarkable 
 thing about it. The gods of Olympus have their shrines side 
 by side with such demi-gods as Herakles and with curious half- 
 
Ancient Greece 61 
 
 Olympian, half-savage deities. On the Acropolis at Athens 
 Athena had her sanctuary cheek by jowl with Artemis Brauro- 
 nia, a bear-goddess. Poseidon and Herakles also had places in 
 her sanctuary. At Sparta Athena, guardian of the city, shared 
 the worship of the town with such deities as Ammon, Eileithyia 
 goddess of fertility, Mother Earth, and other non-Olympian 
 deities, and with Artemis Orthia, whose rites weie famed for 
 their brutality. 
 
 The reason for this intermixture is the same as for the 
 intermixtures that characterize all religions — the growth of 
 new cults upon the old. Later religions take over shrines of 
 religions which they supersede and impose new names or new 
 cults upon old. Even such apparent opposites as Christianity 
 and Islam interact in this way, and in the religious practices 
 of the obscure Bektashi dervishes we find to this day a blending 
 of the two systems, a worship of Christian saints by Moslems, 
 and of Moslem prophets by Christians. 
 
 The different strata that went to the making of Greek 
 religion were approximately three in number. There was first 
 the old Minoan, in which a mother goddess and feminine 
 deities were paramount. Then came the vigorous Olympian 
 deities of the northern invaders, Zeus, Hera, Athena, and the 
 rest, with female goddesses almost of equal status with the male. 
 Lastly, there were alien deities such as Poseidon and Dionysus 
 and semi-Asiatic deities. Associated with the old Minoan 
 strain were the primitive and local earth and water deities, 
 and deities of fertility. They survived the stress of invasions 
 chiefly in Arcadia in the Peloponnese right down to late times, 
 even as late as the second century a.d. 
 
 What concerns our present purpose, however, is not so much 
 the composition of Greek religion as the attitude of the Greek 
 towards it. The variety of religion was the product of the 
 
62 Ancient Greece 
 
 variety of Greek race and temperament. Religion was always 
 free in Greece and no man was forced to worship. Conse- 
 quently every type and kind of cult developed freely. The 
 difference between this religious freedom and the rigid religious 
 hierarchies of the static empires is clear and obvious. So too 
 the priest in Greek religion held no position comparable to the 
 priests of Egypt, Persia, or Assyria. In these empires the priest 
 was of equal importance with the prince ; he served his empire 
 as well as his gods. In Greece the priest served his gods alone 
 and seldom ranked high in the political world. He was essen- 
 tially a functionary whose duties were limited and defined. 
 At no time in Greek history do we hear of an individual Greek 
 priest controlling a political decision or promoting or inhibit- 
 ing a political movement. If such things were done they were 
 done by the religious feeling of the people as a whole. Sparta 
 delayed sending her troops to fight the Persian because the 
 Spartans were engaged in a religious festival. A battle was 
 delayed or precipitated not by the personal influence of the 
 priest but by the effect which the preliminary omens and other 
 religious observances had on the whole body of the soldiers. 
 The priests whom Solon and Herodotus saw in Egypt belonged 
 to a world wholly different from and for the most part alien 
 to all the essential ideas of Hellenism. The priestly hierarchy 
 that condemned Galileo in the Middle Ages or Dreyfus in our 
 own days was a thing unknown in Greek life. The condemna- 
 tion of Socrates may be adduced as a proof of the existence of 
 a hierarchy of this type at Athens. But Socrates was con- 
 demned not so much on religious grounds as on grounds of 
 general prejudice against a reformer and idealist at a time when 
 the public conscience was at the lowest ebb and when men's 
 minds were clouded and warped by a generation of one of the 
 most demoralizing wars of ancient times. Perhaps the most 
 
64 Ancient Greece 
 
 important factor in his condemnation was the fact that amongst 
 his pupils had been Critias, the most ruthless of the Thirty 
 Tyrants at whose hands the people of Athens had suffered so 
 much, while his accusers belonged to the party which had 
 driven out Critias and the rest. The speedy repentance of the 
 Athenians for the condemnation, if it does not palliate the 
 offence, shows at least that they were no priest-ridden people. 
 As a corollary to the fact that Greek religion had no priest- 
 craft, as we understand the term, comes the fact that there was 
 no centralization of religion. Delphi alone bears some resem- 
 blance to a unifying factor. But Delphi centralized the 
 material aims and ambitions of Greece rather than her spiritual 
 ideals. At Delphi was centralized all the intelligence system 
 of ancient Greece. All who visited the great shrine from all 
 the ends of the ancient world must have given, as well as their 
 offerings, information which, to Greece, was of priceless value. 
 Throughout early Greek history it is always the oracle of 
 Delphi which advises or dissuades in matters of commercial 
 enterpiise and political decision. Its judgement was seldom 
 at fault, for its information was good. Once only did it blunder, 
 and its prestige never really recovered from the error. It 
 counselled submission to the Persian invader at a time when 
 every heart in Greece was against it. All too late it altered 
 its decision, but Themistocles, keen-witted and irreligious, had 
 seen through the oracle and proclaimed its falsity. The reasons 
 for this great blunder are obscure. Corruption or genuine 
 error may explain it. But for once the real insight that 
 characterized the usual decisions of the oracle was lacking. 
 Probably the oracle adopted a pacific attitude because it knew 
 so much about Persia and its knowledge bred fear. * Pacifists ' 
 in recent times have been produced for the same reasons and 
 under similar circumstances. 
 
Ancient Greece 65 
 
 But even at Delphi priestcraft was in the background. It is 
 remarkable that in the whole history of the oracle we hear of 
 no single priest pre-eminent as an individual. It is always 
 the * oracle ' or ' Apollo ' who advises or acts. The oracle was 
 managed by priestly clans of which we barely know even the 
 names. They must have developed the system and organization 
 well, for we never hear of them as individuals. 
 
 Thus Delphi achieved its reputation more by its practical 
 help to civilization and by its monopoly of good information 
 than by its sanctity. It warned the oppressor of cities and 
 helped the enterprising citizen. Its attitude for the most 
 part favoured moral action and condemned injustice. Above 
 all Delphi superintended and encouraged the liberation of 
 slaves. If, as a sanctuary, it was pre-eminent in Greece it was 
 supreme also as an Intelligence Bureau. 
 
 Religion then to the ancient Greek was largely his own affair, 
 the choice of the individual. To-day we seem to have much 
 the same state of affairs in our own country. But this resem- 
 blance in type between the religion of the ancient Greek and 
 that of the ordinary English citizen is of the slightest nature. 
 To the Greek religion was observance, ritual, and awe combined, 
 with lurking in the background great forces whose action 
 revolved on mighty wheels. ' What is fated, fixed, or destined ' 
 — it is seldom made into a personification — is at the back of all 
 action. Men must see to it that the smaller wheels of their own 
 actions revolve in harmony with the greater mechanism ; 
 otherwise the smaller will be shattered. This is no more akin 
 to the Oriental idea of destiny than is the universe of our own 
 Victorian philosophers. Again we meet the distinction between 
 static and living. The Destiny of the Oriental is written down 
 once'and for all : 
 
 2536.4 
 
66 Ancient Greece 
 
 The moving finger writes, and having writ 
 Moves on ; nor all thy piety nor wit 
 Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, 
 Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it. 
 
 The Destiny of the Greeks was a thing that worked per- 
 petually, without going backwards. It was like a river that 
 flows on and on and is never the same twice. Perhaps the 
 comparison to a vast mechanism is unfair. It would resemble 
 rather something that works out its growth according to 
 inexorable laws. John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer held 
 to a view of existence little different from this. 
 
 In this vast revolving scheme of the ancient Greek that 
 changes not and yet is never the same, is Man, an infinitesimal 
 unit. His actions and his wishes must be governed and con- 
 trolled in subservience to the scheme. If he does this all will 
 be well and harmonious ; if he does the reverse something will 
 go wrong and he, not the mechanism, will be destroyed. 
 Blasphemy was what the little infinitesimal creature Man 
 shouted against the mechanism that crushed him silently. 
 Sin was what he did that caused him to be crushed. Such, at 
 least, was what the Greek thought in the dawn of his history. 
 Later reflection modified his views to a large extent, but, for 
 the most part, this fundamental idea of a fixed destiny working 
 on its own lines persisted throughout the years of the full bloom 
 of Hellenism. Aeschylus and Pindar, essentially poets of a 
 period and of a people, gave these ideas fixed literary form. 
 One of the words used for this unchanging fate is used by both 
 these writers to describe life and death alike as ' fated ', or as 
 we should say 'natural'. It describes also all the normal 
 events of life. ■ A king to Pindar is * fated ' to be such ; later 
 Xenophon calls death the ' fated end of life ' and war a thing 
 ' fated always to be among men '. 
 
Ancient Greece 67 
 
 Morality as we know it grew out of this larger cosmology. 
 Man's behaviour to man was regulated by these larger destinies. 
 Wrong takes the form of * going too far ', of overstepping 
 limits enjoined by the scheme of things. An oath is in the 
 Greek word literally \ a fence ' ; to break it down is wrong 
 because it offends against the order of things. The early 
 words for ' justice ' mean the ' normal course of events '. 
 The Greek word for Law and Order in its earliest usage means 
 literally ' what is fixed or fated '. The word ' Themis ' which 
 the Greek used in this meaning is, in language, identical with 
 the English word ' Doom \ 
 
 Thus from the earliest times the idea of personal right or 
 wrong doing does not appear. Man is sinning when he is 
 breaking down the established order of things. Mn rflliJx„ 
 in short, is social, not individual : it is of the community and 
 of the group. Death, in the words of Xenophon, is the ' fated 
 end ' of a normal life, and so it does not control or affect the 
 moral outlook in any appreciable way. Still less does any 
 conception of an after-life do this. Man's life was orientated 
 to face neither the past nor the future but the present. There 
 might be an after-life or another existence, but man was too 
 small a creature to know of it. How could the cog in the great 
 wheels of the mechanism realize how and why and to what 
 end the mechanism worked \ Euripides, candid and direct as 
 ever, sums up the question in a way in which we, with nineteen 
 centuries of * other worldly ' teaching, should find it hard to do : 1 
 
 If any far-off state there be 
 
 Dearer than life to Mortality, 
 
 The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof 
 
 And mist is under and mist above, 
 
 And we drift on legends for ever. 
 
 1 Htppolytus, 1 91-197. 
 E 2 
 
68 Ancient Greece 
 
 The ordinary Greek peasant or citizen took, implicitly or 
 explicitly, just such a view as this. He did, nevertheless, 
 visualize a rather indeterminate kind of existence after 
 death. But it was rather an existence which from its drear 
 misery made life the sweeter. The Hades of Homer shows 
 us the other world with the spirits of the dead, bloodless 
 shadows of reality. In one of the finest passages in any literature 
 Odysseus describes his visit to the dead : 1 
 
 * Brides and youths unwed, and old men of many and evil 
 days, and tender maidens with grief fresh at heart ; and many 
 there were wounded with bronze-shod spears, men slain in 
 fight with their bloody mail about them. And these spirits 
 flocked together from every side . . . with a wondrous cry ; 
 and pale fear gat hold on me.' 
 
 He sees his own mother among the throng. ' Dear child,' she 
 says to him, * how didst thou come beneath the darkness and 
 the shadow, thou that art a living man ? ' 
 
 This old view of the after-life changed but little in the course 
 of years. In the tombs of the fifth century and fourth century 
 we find vases depicting the living sorrowing for the dead. The 
 tombs of the dead are shown, and round them flit little winged 
 human figures like small gnats — the souls of the dead. 
 
 Such, then, was the view of the ordinary Greek. Death was 
 the fated end of life, and little more that mattered. But so 
 varied and so rich was the genius of Greek thought that here 
 and there some thinker or poet arose above the common view 
 or expanded it into something greater and more significant. 
 There was immortality inherent in the fullest and finest type 
 of mortality, said Plato : 2 
 
 1 Even in the life of the same individual ', he says, ' there is 
 
 1 xi. 36. 
 
 2 Symposium, 207 (Jowett's translation). 
 
Ancient Greece 69 
 
 succession and not absolute unity. A man is called the same, 
 and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and 
 age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, 
 he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation — 
 hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always 
 changing ; which is true not only of the body but also of the 
 soul, whose habits, tempers, desires, pleasures, pains, and fears 
 never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming 
 and going ; . . . and in this way the mortal body, or mortal 
 anything, partakes of immortality.' 
 
 Plato treats elsewhere of immortality in the dialogue which 
 enshrines his account of the death of Socrates, ' concerning 
 whom ', he says, ' I may truly say that of all the men of his 
 time whom I have known he was the wisest and justest and 
 best '. 1 Here his belief in immortality of the soul is based upon 
 the permanent and durable character of spiritual and ideal 
 things. For, perhaps, the first time in the history of Greek 
 thought the ethical element is introduced into the idea of 
 immortality. Bad souls are those in which the corporeal and 
 material elements prevail ; consequently their immortality is 
 decreased. 
 
 'This corporeal element', he says, ' is heavy and weighty and 
 earthy and is that element of sight by which a soul is depressed 
 and dragged down again into the visible world . . . prowling 
 about tombs and sepulchres, near which, as they tell us, are 
 seen certain ghostly apparitions of souls which have not 
 departed pure but are cloyed with sight and therefore 
 visible.' 2 
 
 Thus for the first time in Greece moral behaviour and 
 immortality are brought into relation, perhaps rather fantasti- 
 cally. Milton echoes the same idea in Comus : 
 
 1 Pbaedo, 118. 2 Ibid., Si. 
 
70 Ancient Greece 
 
 But when lust . . . 
 By lewd and lavish act of sin 
 Lets in defilement to the inward parts, 
 The soul grows clotted by contagion, 
 Imbodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose 
 The divine property of her first being. 
 
 But Plato was not a characteristic Greek. He stood on 
 a pinnacle alone, his genius unreached and unequalled. He was 
 Greek only in so far as he followed no authority and was not 
 the direct product of some development of philosophy. His 
 views in his day were the exception rather than the rule. The 
 ordinary Greek, nimble-minded and broad-thinking though 
 he was, still never rose to these heights. He still thought of 
 the dead as poor pathetic disembodied spirits hovering aim- 
 lessly in the grey under-world. Immortality to him meant 
 little or nothing. His views are voiced for us by Homer, 
 Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and to a less extent by Euripides. 
 Grave monuments and vases depict for us a stately and re- 
 strained grief for the dead. One sees the stateliness of sorrow 
 with all its intensity in these representations. The more 
 articulate grief and the pomp and ceremony of oriental peoples 
 is absent. Only later, towards the end of the fourth century 
 B.C., did grief begin to exceed its proper bounds and the orna- 
 ments of the grave became too lavish and tasteless. Then 
 a certain Demetrius of Phalerum, as governor of Athens, set 
 himself up as an arbiter of taste, armed at the same time with 
 the power to execute his decisions. He enacted legislation 
 limiting and restricting the expenses incurred in the erection 
 of tombs and tomb-sculptures. From the end of the fourth 
 century for a long period graves are composed of simple slabs 
 or pillars quite undecorated. 
 
 These briefly were the ideas of the average Greek upon the 
 
Ancient Greece 71 
 
 fundamental things of life and death. Individual views varied, 
 as they vary in all free communities, and it is almost impossible 
 to generalize ; but ideas such as I have described formed the 
 background of the daily life of the Greek at a time when the 
 foundations of social intercourse and development had not 
 begun to be shaken by that most demoralizing and devastating 
 of all the works of man — civil war. 
 
 In one thing the Greek outlook on life was, in its forms of 
 expression, less like what we are accustomed to. Love in its 
 various forms meets with but scant treatment, so it seems to 
 us, at the hands of the great Greek poets and dramatists. Of 
 all the Greek plays known to us few treat of love as it is treated 
 in modern drama. In one play only is it a vital and functional 
 part of the plot — the Hippolytus of Euripides. In the Medea 
 it is not so much love revenged as a punishment of a dis- 
 honourable action that is the plot. Yet love in all its most 
 characteristic aspects appears in Greek art and literature the 
 more subtly drawn just because it is not, as with us, the central 
 figure. But it is always human love, the love of lovers, of 
 husband and wife, of parent and child, and it is always love 
 unsentimental, direct, and genuine. Only when Hellenism 
 was a shadow and the world was old does a tone of melancholy 
 akin to sentimentality begin to appear : 
 
 * When I am gone, Cleobulus, cast among the fire of young 
 loves, I lie a brand in the ashes — I pray thee make the burial 
 urn drunk with wine ere thou lay it under earth, and write on 
 it " Love's gift to Death ".' 
 
 How different is this from the clear bold hymn of 
 Sophocles : 
 
 * Love unvanquished, Love that wastest wealth, that 
 broodest at night upon the soft cheek of Youth ; Love that 
 movest o'er the deep and in the wildest corners of the earth, 
 
72 Ancient Greece 
 
 no mortal or immortal can escape thy fierce grasp . . . resistlessly 
 doth Aphrodite play her game.' * 
 
 The clear-minded Greek saw at once how love, whether the 
 passion of lover for lover or the blind protective love of a 
 mother for her offspring, was a thing that man could not 
 control. As such it had for him something of a subversive 
 nature; it was dangerous. Medea destroys a dynasty; Phaedra, 
 in killing herself, makes a father kill his son. It had all the 
 elements of ruin and destruction. Plato, in revolt against the 
 unreason of love, approaches the problem, as he approaches 
 all problems, from the point of view of reason. He tries to 
 rationalize the irrational. There are two Aphrodites, he says, 
 one coarse, the other refined. Love which is the gift of the 
 former 
 
 * has no discrimination . . . and is of the body rather than of 
 the soul ; the most foolish beings are the objects of this love 
 which desires only to gain an end, but never thinks of accom- 
 plishing the end nobly, and therefore does good and evil quite 
 indiscriminately.' 2 
 
 The love which comes from the latter loves ' intelligent 
 beings whose reason is beginning to be developed '. ' Any 
 one ', he says, ' may recognize the pure enthusiasts in the very 
 nature of their attachments.' 
 
 Love is thus made wholesome. Love of the immature or 
 unintelligent is base and wrong. Here we have love idealized 
 and made fine and worthy. The Greek, to whom reason and 
 intellect, when his mind was unclouded by emotion, always 
 came first, tried, as Plato tried, to cleanse simple passion and 
 idealize it. Ancient Greece has long lain under the accusation 
 of condoning unnatural vice. Here in Plato we see at once the 
 
 1 Antigone, 781. 2 Symposium, 181. 
 
Ancient Greece 73 
 
 reason and the cure. Greeks valued the intellect above all 
 things ; but their patriarchal traditions were strong, inherited 
 from a day when women were for the most part in the back- 
 ground. Women thus seldom attained to the intellectual 
 development and freedom reached by the men. So from an 
 unnatural state of society arose an unnatural state of affairs in 
 which friendship between men ripened at times into a stronger 
 affection, while the love of woman was relegated to a lower 
 plane. ' Discrimination ', says Plato in effect, * is everything.' 
 Fastidiousness was ever a Greek virtue, and so the love of a being 
 whose intellect was not on a level with that of the lover was to 
 Plato, as to many Greeks, something outrageous. 
 
 In all Greek literature we find this fear of the irrational, and 
 above all of the unreason of love. Plato alone tried to 
 rationalize it. 
 
 The scheme of life that philosophers and politicians evolved 
 for the Greeks meant that, explicitly or implicitly, some 
 co-ordination of behaviour was necessary, some fixing of the 
 moral code. Aeschylus, Hesiod, Pindar, and others had based 
 it upon the eternal order of creation. Evil was what trans- 
 gressed, what broke the rules. Good was what was done in 
 submission to them. From this it was easy for two lines of 
 thought to develop. The one held that the scheme of things 
 was either irrational or else incomprehensible, and man was 
 driven to solve his problems in his own way, as best he might. 
 Thus Euripides, tending to scepticism, presented the problems 
 of life to his audience, solving some and leaving others un- 
 solved. 
 
 The other way accepted the universe as a scheme, but inter- 
 preted it as a rational scheme and so tried to rationalize all 
 action. Plato solved the problems of action and behaviour by 
 appealing to reason and, through reason, to the firmer founda- 
 
74 Ancient Greece 
 
 tions of all existence which he took to be both good and just. 
 All actions must be judged by the standard of perfection. 
 
 Later Aristotle undertook the analysis of the motives for 
 good and bad action, following the lead of Plato and judging 
 them by the light of reason. But Aristotle, unlike Plato, had 
 the methods of a scientist. He presents his material and his 
 evidence and lets his conclusions emerge. In his treatise on 
 Ethics we find set down a list of what he considered were 
 reasonable attitudes to life, in a word virtues. 1 
 
 From this list we can derive a remarkably accurate idea of 
 the moral and intellectual life of the average Greek. The 
 differences and similarities between what the Greek held to 
 be virtues and what we believe them to be ourselves to-day are 
 striking, so striking, in fact, as to enable us to get a very clear 
 idea of the immense debt we owe to Greece. But to understand 
 this properly we must examine Aristotle's account. 
 
 The most important thing about this list drawn up by 
 Aristotle is perhaps the fact that all the various qualities he 
 selects are so selected because of their suitability not so much 
 for the individual of pre-eminent merit as for the average 
 citizen. Genius, as we know it, and its elements figure but 
 little in the list. The virtues have been scientifically chosen — 
 in other words, they have been collected from observed phe- 
 nomena — the usual scientific method. Aristotle has not 
 analysed the internal working of the human mind and gone to 
 the founts of action themselves. He has rather observed the 
 social organism from without as a detached scientist, and from 
 within as a member of the organism. He has noticed that 
 certain frames of mind and certain attitudes produce the most 
 favourable results or tend to the most favourable developments 
 in society. To these frames of mind or attitudes he gives 
 1 For the following pages see Aristotle, Ethics, Books II and VII. 
 
Ancient Greece 75 
 
 names or scientific terms as far as he can. Unlike modern 
 scientists, however, he chooses his terminology from the 
 current language of the day. Where no suitable term exists 
 he but rarely invents a new one. Terms used vaguely in 
 the current language were thus given more precise meanings, 
 and what they described thus became more clearly understood. 
 The effect of this scientific precision and fixing of thought and 
 language in matters of ethics and human behaviour was of 
 immense value to posterity. It has been rightly said of Aristotle 
 that ' his influence upon the forms of language of civilized 
 Europe can hardly be overrated. It is far greater than has 
 ever been exercised by any one man beside.' 1 Aristotle's 
 system of examining and treating the attitudes of mind which 
 he selects as the best virtues for the citizen to cultivate is 
 simple. Each virtue selected is found to be midway between 
 an inadequate and an extreme version of the attitude of mind 
 that it represents. Thus, to take the simplest, Courage is a 
 virtue lying midway between Fear and Foolhardiness. The 
 rest are chosen, it is true, arbitrarily. But the principle of 
 selection in Aristotle's mind is sound ; it is based on scientific 
 observation. Those virtues are selected which are the virtues not 
 so much of an individual as of a group. As will be seen later, 
 there are, from our point of view, remarkable omissions. But 
 these omissions are due largely to the changed nature of society, 
 the different system under which we live to-day. An examina- 
 tion of the rest of Aristotle's list leads to interesting results. 
 
 Temperance and Liberality are the next two virtues. The 
 former is a mean between Unrestraint and Extreme Asceticism. 
 For this latter extreme Aristotle uses a term meaning Insensi- 
 bility of a passive kind. There is no adequate word for 
 active Asceticism as we know it. We may infer from this 
 1 Sir A. Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle, i. 507. 
 
y6 Ancient Greece 
 
 that active Asceticism played little or no part in Greek life, 
 a useful inference. 
 
 Liberality is a mean between Prodigality and ' Stinginess \ 
 
 Truthfulness and Restraint are two more in the list. Truth- 
 fulness is a virtue because it lies midway between two unbalanced 
 frames of mind. In its exaggerated form it is a kind of False 
 Pretension — the term given to it (alazoneia) is used sometimes 
 in Greek to denote ' over-responsiveness ' or ' over-readiness 
 to sound ' in the case of a badly played musical instrument. 
 The other extreme of Truthfulness is ' Irony ', which is ignor- 
 ance purposely affected. 
 
 Restraint clearly lies midway between hot temper and 
 impassivity. A man should curb his anger without being quite 
 unresponsive. 
 
 Liveliness or Wittiness is, rather to our surprise, included in 
 the list. It is essentially a quality that helped on the life of 
 a social unit. It lies midway between Buffoonery, which is 
 wittiness pushed to an extreme, and Boorishness, which is the 
 absence of all liveliness and wit. 
 
 Friendliness, which is fully and closely analysed by Aristotle, 
 holds an important place in the list. The extremes to be avoided 
 are Flattery on the one hand and Quarrelsomeness on the other. 
 
 Finally we have three qualities, closely related and remarkable 
 because of the light they throw upon the Greek outlook. They 
 are called Proper Ambition, Magnificence, and Greatness of 
 Spirit. The first lies between a frame of mind that never rests 
 from ambition regardless of friendship and happiness, and one 
 which is impassive and has no ambition at all. Magnificence, 
 an unusual quality we think to count as a virtue, means rather 
 ' Doing a thing on a proper scale \ x If you entertain a king, see 
 
 1 For a fine description of the social value of such a quality see 
 Demosthenes, Androtion y 617. 
 
Ancient Greece yy 
 
 that you entertain him royally ; if a great man visits you, have 
 fitting company to meet him. Polycrates of Samos, says 
 Herodotus, had this virtue more than any other man of his day. 
 He was open-handed and large-minded. Xenophon speaks of 
 a race-horse as having the quality. One of the extremes of 
 which this virtue is a mean is ' want of taste ' or lack of interest 
 in the good things of life ; a man would so entertain ' on 
 the cheap ' or furnish his house ' shoddily \ The other 
 extreme is sheer vulgarity or Bad Taste — the behaviour of the 
 ambitious profiteer who spares no expense and achieves no 
 good result. 
 
 Last is Greatness of Spirit, a quality essentially Greek 
 throughout Greek history. It can best be understood from 
 its extremes. Of the latter, one is a kind of puffed-up pride or 
 unsubstantial show. The actual word Aristotle uses is used in 
 Greek for a variety of things. It is used of the sea-foam and of 
 snow, things which give most show and have little substance. 
 ' Sponginess ' or ' porousness ' is a common literal translation 
 of the word. On the other extreme is Pettiness or Littleness 
 of Spirit. Thus midway between a spirit that is ' spongy ' 
 or ' inflated ' and one that is withered and petty lies this 
 Greatness of Spirit, Generosity of Soul or Breadth of Mind, 
 whichever we wish to call it. Socrates possessed the quality ; 
 he died with no recrimination on his lips and no bitter words. 
 Pericles faced his critics with a breadth of mind that put them 
 to confusion. The History of Thucydides, which holds no 
 spitefulness or rancour, is a fine example of it. 
 
 From the observation of his fellow men Aristotle thus picked 
 out what he thought, and what certainly most of his readers 
 would have agreed, were the best social virtues and those most 
 likely to lead to the increase of the amenities of life in a city. 
 Most prominent throughout the finest periods of Greek 
 
o 
 E 
 H 
 <! 
 
 O 
 <! 
 
 PQ 
 
 Q 
 
Ancient Greece 79 
 
 history were the virtues of Temperance, Greatness of Spirit, 
 and Friendliness. The excesses of all three in the same way- 
 were uppermost on the occasions when there occurred those 
 brief but black periods of sudden break-down, when morality 
 seemed to have vanished and every social virtue to have been 
 extinguished. 
 
 This hard and fast list drawn up by Aristotle may seem to us 
 to be arbitrary, incomplete, and narrow-minded. It certainly 
 has all these three faults. But it is arbitrary only in so far as 
 all classifications are apt to be so ; it seems incomplete mainly 
 because it excludes many good qualities and attitudes of mind 
 that are the growth of a later age and other circumstances ; 
 it is narrow-minded, perhaps, because all the spiritual aims 
 of past ages seem to be such in comparison with our own. 
 
 The gaps in the list are what interest us most. Humility, or 
 anything remotely resembling it, is absent. Self-sacrifice is not 
 there. Charity does not figure in any shape or form, nor Hope, 
 nor Faith. There is an illimitable chasm between our world of 
 ideal behaviour and that of Ancient Greece, it seems. 
 
 But the gaps are not so empty as it appears. Humility is to 
 be found in the Aristotelian Temperance, though it is not the 
 abject self-abasement which some people imagine it to be. 
 Charity lies in Liberality, but it is neither the charity that 
 proclaims itself from the hill-tops nor yet that which indulges 
 a secret pride from being hid. Self-sacrifice must, to a certain 
 extent, be latent in the Restraint and Truthfulness of Aristotle's 
 list, though not consciously there. Hope may be found in 
 Courage. Faith alone finds no place at all. If Faith, as St. Paul 
 says, is the ' evidence of things not seen ', its omission is compre- 
 hensible. The Greek was too direct, too scientific, too exacting, 
 for it to mean'anything to him. 
 
 Plato, whose list of virtues was never worked out in detail, 
 
8o Ancient Greece 
 
 but is in essence the same as that of Aristotle, gives us 
 Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Wisdom and (though 
 unemphasized) Holiness (Hosiotes). This virtue of Holiness 
 does not appear in Aristotle. It was not characteristically 
 Greek, and Plato himself was not characteristic of Greece. 
 What Holiness meant exactly to Plato it is hard to say. ' Re- 
 spect for religious practice ' is really the most that it can mean. 
 As such it would approximate almost to Tolerance and so be 
 largely implicit in Temperance. In any case it had no wider 
 meaning and little resembled what Holiness means to us. 
 Aristotle recognized no connexion between established Religion 
 and Ethics. The old cosmology of Pindar and Aeschylus was 
 superseded by a more rational scheme of things. Plato, 
 essentially a mystic, may not have recognized this severance so 
 clearly as Aristotle did. To realize what this separation of 
 Religion and Ethics meant we can find a good example of it 
 in the case of the Orthodox Church to-day, especially in 
 modern Greece, where religion is simply religious observance 
 and has little or no moral teaching attached to it. Sermons 
 and moral instruction are quite incidental in the Orthodox 
 Church and are mainly the affair of laymen. 
 
 But there are serious gaps in our own system of the good life, 
 according to the Greek idea. Good Taste is hardly a common 
 attitude of mind to-day. Greatness of Spirit is a virtue that 
 seems negatived by Christian Humility. Magnificence of 
 behaviour seems contrary to our code, because it is essentially 
 an attitude of mind of a limited circle. 
 
 But the differences are incidental and not fatal. The 
 Aristotelian list still remains at once a model of social virtues 
 and an illuminating commentary upon the life and thought of 
 the average Greek of those times. From a consideration of all 
 these Greek qualities certain generalizations emerge. What the 
 
Ancient Greece 81 
 
 Greek condemned above all was impassivity of mind, lack of 
 responsiveness, and shoddiness. ' Illiberality ', ' Littleness of 
 Spirit ', ' Lack of Proper Ambition ', are all wrong qualities : 
 they all lead to stagnation. No vigorous social group can 
 survive their deadening influence. Conversely a true develop- 
 ment of the individuality that is not egotism leads to a healthy 
 development of the State. The higher qualities of the self are 
 thus at the back of all the Aristotelian virtues. Greatness of 
 Spirit, above all, means progress and growth to society. Petti- 
 ness leads to its disruption. It is remarkable that in all Greek 
 history we hear little either of hypocrisy, shoddiness, or snobbery, 
 the besetting petty sins of modern life. Only once in Greek 
 literature do we hear of anything of the kind. Theophrastus, 
 who wrote a series of sketches of Queer Characters, describes 
 the Greek snob of his day. But his snobbery is political rather 
 than social. He is essentially the old Conservative of a bad 
 type, hating Democracy and longing for the * good old days \ 
 
 From these individual virtues emerged the virtues of society 
 as a whole. Constant activity and liveliness of mind in the 
 citizens led to the development of corporate excellences. 
 Most notable and most remarkable of these was the political 
 freedom (' Freedom of speech ' is a literal translation of the 
 word) that was the pride of Periclean Athens. Any man could 
 express publicly any opinion on any subject. In the darkest 
 days of Athenian history the tradition held firm. When the 
 empire of Athens was on the point of collapse, when Athenian 
 might was humbled and almost broken, on the stage and in 
 the streets men could pass any criticism they wished upon the 
 management of state affairs or upon politics or upon religion. 
 The condemnation of Socrates, as we have seen, was the one 
 apparent exception. But his condemnation was one of the 
 results of a sudden and temporary cessation of this right. The 
 
 2536.4 F 
 
82 Ancient Greece 
 
 Thirty, justly called Tyrants, were directly responsible for 
 a reign of terror identical with the worst proscriptions of the 
 Roman Republic. That Athens for the greater part of the 
 fifth century should have reached the height of political 
 freedom that she did is a token of her greatness. In England 
 it is barely a generation since the Blasphemy Laws were used 
 to suppress genuine freedom of speech. To-day an accusation 
 of seditious behaviour can make almost similar restrictions 
 possible, while temporary legislation and censorship during 
 the war entirely destroyed freedom of speech for a time. Yet 
 Athens in the middle of a war to the death permitted the per- 
 formance of the plays of Aristophanes wherein generals and 
 admirals were held up to derision and Athenian policy was 
 subjected to the severest criticism. English freedom has taken 
 over twelve centuries to achieve. Athens achieved hers in one. 
 
 But if Greece had brought her social virtues to a pitch of 
 perfection in theory and largely also in practice, her very 
 immaturity led to the growth of social vices as terrible and as 
 disruptive as any in history. In an impartial estimate of the debt 
 we owe to Greece they must not be omitted : from a con- 
 sideration of her failures we can infer the greatness of her virtues. 
 
 Internal political strife and its concomitant of treachery are 
 the two most disruptive factors in Greek history, factors that 
 went far towards the break-up of that long-planned Utopia, 
 the Greek City-State. Pausanias, the traveller, in a sombre 
 passage x describes the fatal tendency of Greece to breed 
 traitors within her gates : 
 
 ' That foulest of all crimes,' he says, a propos of the history 
 of the fourth century, ' the betrayal of native land and fellow 
 countrymen for personal gain, was fated to be the source of 
 a series of disasters to the Achaeans as it had been to others. 
 
Ancient Greece 83 
 
 Indeed the crime has never been unknown in Greece since 
 time began. . . . The plague of treachery never died out.' 
 
 He adds a long list of notorious traitors. 
 
 So great and abundant is our evidence for treachery of this 
 nature that we are driven to the conclusion that it was due to 
 some defect or defects inherent in the Greek character. No- 
 thing is worse, said the Greeks themselves, than the moral 
 degeneration of good men. If bad men become worse, we know 
 at least what to expect ; but when good men become evil, we 
 are at a loss and the future cannot be foretold. In times of 
 peace it was just possible to control or restrain these out- 
 breaks or to prevent the moral collapse of state or group ; but 
 in war-time, when all moral sanctions are loosened, it becomes 
 almost impossible to control this spirit of evil. 
 
 ' In peace and prosperity ', says Thucydides, 1 ' both states and 
 individuals are actuated by higher motives, because they do not 
 fall under the common dominion of imperious necessities ; but 
 war, which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life, 
 is a hard master and tends to assimilate men's characters to 
 their conditions.' 
 
 One is tempted to believe that Greece might have kept her 
 spiritual grasp of the world if the Peloponnesian War had not 
 taken place. Yet this war itself was part of the price which 
 civilization will always have to pay. Where spiritual ideals 
 and spiritual development vary in quality there will always be 
 the envy and hatred of the perfect by the imperfect. Where 
 three such different varieties of the same culture as Sparta, 
 Corinth, and Athens existed, envy and hatred were sure to be 
 found. Gradually the clash of ideals changed to a clash of 
 arms. But it was from within that disruption and dismember- 
 
 1 iii. 82 (Jowett's translation). 
 F2 
 
84 Ancient Greece 
 
 ment came. Strif e within cities spread to strife between states 
 and so to divisions that grew and multiplied and were always 
 — changing. Gibbon, summarizing the causes of the fall of Rome 
 from her greatness, reproduces for his readers conditions which, 
 originating from the same reasons, were almost identical with 
 the conditions that brought about the fall of Greece. 
 
 ' Under the dominion of the Greek and French emperors ', 
 he says, * the peace of the city was disturbed by accidental 
 though frequent seditions ; it is from the decline of the latter, 
 from the beginning of the tenth century, that we may date 
 the licentiousness of private war, which violated with impunity 
 the laws of the Code and the Gospel, without respecting the 
 majesty of the absent sovereign or the presence and person of 
 the vicar of Christ. In a dark period of five hundred years, 
 Rome was perpetually afflicted by the sanguinary quarrels 
 of the nobles and people, the Guelphs and Ghibelines, the 
 Colonna and Ursini.' x 
 
 The fiist serious form of this spirit of sedition that made its 
 appearance in Greece, called by the Greeks ' stasis ' (or 
 1 secession '), was in the year 427 B.C., when Greece had been 
 involved in internal war for four years. Thucydides, with the 
 acuteness of perception that makes him the greatest of all 
 historians, saw and foretold that it was the germ of the destruc- 
 tion of all Greek culture. By an irony of Fate the beautiful 
 island of Corfu chanced to be the scene of the drama, a setting 
 as exquisite as the tragedy was awful. 
 
 ' This seemed to be the worst of all revolutions,' says the 
 historian, 2 ' because it was the first.' 
 
 From the sixth century until this time there had been what 
 Gibbon calls ' accidental though frequent seditions ', but this 
 
 1 Decline and Fall oj the Roman Empire^ ch. 71, sec. 4. 
 
 2 iii. 81. 
 
Ancient Greece 85 
 
 sedition of Corfu was of a kind which Thucydides immediately 
 recognized as a real scourge of civilization. Above all, it was 
 a sedition that was the worse because it took place in war-time 
 without any direct connexion with military events, because 
 it occurred when moral sanctions were shaken and men's 
 characters were ' assimilated to their conditions \ 
 
 ' This revolution ', says Thucydides, 1 * gave birth to every 
 form of wickedness in Hellas. The simplicity which is so large 
 an element in a noble nature, was laughed to scorn and dis- 
 appeared. An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere 
 prevailed ; for there was no word binding enough nor oath 
 terrible enough to reconcile enemies. . . . Inferior intellects 
 generally succeeded best, for, aware of their deficiencies and 
 fearing the capacity of their opponents . . . they struck boldly 
 and at once. But the cleverer sort, presuming in their arrogance 
 that they would be aware in time and disdaining to act when 
 they could think,lwere taken off their guard and easily destroyed.' 
 
 Thus in a small place and on a small scale Greece saw its coming 
 ruin enacted ; all the elements of the larger tragedy were 
 there, but the actors were as yet but few. Thucydides was 
 probably not the only man who saw the way in which things 
 were trending. But all who saw were powerless. The break-up 
 had begun, and from 427 b.c. onwards the history of Greece is 
 a record, not of development and advance, but of a fight against 
 the disintegrating factors within, moral, political, and social. 
 
 What was begun in the fifth century increased and multiplied 
 in the fourth. We have no Thucydides to put his finger on 
 the vital spots and tell us grimly but clearly how events were 
 shaping. Our history of the fourth century lies in a variety 
 of books of moderate worth written by men whose historical 
 ability lay rather in the recording than in the interpretation 
 of facts. Inscriptions, perhaps, give us a clearer picture of 
 
 1 iii. 83. 
 
86 Ancient Greece 
 
 things — and they are numerous for this period. From one 
 such we get an insight into the state of affairs in a group of 
 small Greek cities in Crete. The two cities of Dreros and 
 Cnossos were in alliance together against a third which lay 
 between them — Lyttos. What had taken place we do not 
 know for certain, because our only record is in the inscriptions, 
 but it appears that Lyttos had occupied territory claimed by 
 Dreros. Our inscription x preserves for us an oath sworn by 
 the young men of Dreros. For sheer grim hatred unrelieved 
 by any element of forgiveness it is hard to find a parallel, unless 
 it be in the notorious German Hymn of Hate. The oath runs 
 thus : 
 
 ' This is the oath of the young men (of Dreros) not yet of 
 age for military service, to the number of a hundred and 
 eighty : 
 
 1 " I swear by Hestia of the Prytaneium, by Zeus Agoraios, 
 Zeus Tallaios, by Delphinian Apollo, by Athena Guardian 
 of the city, by Pythian Apollo, by Leto, by Artemis, by Ares, 
 by Aphrodite, by Hermes, by the Sun, by Britomartis, by 
 Phoenix, by Amphiona, by Earth and Heaven, by Heroes male 
 and female, by springs and rivers and all gods male and female 
 that I will never bear good will towards the men of the city 
 of Lyttos in any act or plan of mine, either by night or by day, 
 and I will contrive evil as far as in me lies against the city of 
 the men of Lyttos." ' 
 
 More follows in the same strain, giving in full the penalties 
 resulting from the breaking of the oath. Furthermore, each 
 of the youths is to plant an olive tree in the territory conquered 
 back from Lyttos and to see to its tending and growth, subject 
 to a severe penalty. 
 
 Surely history has nothing worse to record than this solemn 
 compact to do evil in the name of all the gods of Greece, 
 
 1 Collitz and Bechtel's Greek Inscriptions^ No. 4952 
 
o 
 
 P 
 
 O 
 
 S 
 
88 • Ancient Greece 
 
 old and new, local and universal. The sedition of Corfu had 
 set the ball rolling. Away in the mountain fastnesses of Crete 
 these tiny cities, in working their own ruin, were working that 
 of Greece as well. 
 
 It forms a grim comment that by the irony of fate this very 
 city of Dreros was almost destroyed by internal civil strife dur- 
 ing the ensuing century and had to appeal for arbitration to its 
 ancient enemy Lyttos. The arbitrators who came thence saw, 
 in the words of a later inscription, ' how everything was ruined 
 and in the utmost confusion and all sanctions destroyed '. 
 They were publicly hailed as ' saviours, helpers, and protectors \ 
 
 That so great changes in one little city could have taken 
 place in a century, an eternal oath sworn and forsworn, a 
 neighbour cursed for ever and then hailed as a saviour, is 
 eloquent testimony to the moral collapse of the times. 
 
 For us this record of decay is, or should be, of inestimable 
 value for our own guidance. We have before us the picture, 
 with all its detail remorselessly and pitilessly set down, of 
 a culture at its prime slowly and inexorably declining, breaking 
 up and finally frittering away its greatness in a hundred minor 
 futilities. What makes the tragedy the more worth our study 
 is that it is the tragedy of a people who for the first time in 
 the history of the world brought to the highest pitch of per- 
 fection the majority of the activities of the human spirit. We 
 can learn the more from our study of it because we ourselves 
 have followed to a very large extent the same lines of develop- 
 ment and because few, if any, of the spiritual activities of 
 ancient Greece are alien to our own. 
 
 But if Thucydides shows the way in which Greece began to 
 decline, he does not, because he cannot, tell us the reasons. 
 He gives us the ' How ' but not the * Why '. For the reasons for 
 the decline of Greece we must consult a variety of authorities, 
 
Ancient Greece 89 
 
 political, biological, racial, and physical, and we thus find our- 
 selves at once faced with a variety of theories as to the de- 
 cline of Greek culture, adequate and inadequate, serious and 
 fantastic, probable and improbable. 
 
 Unfortunately our authorities are not all of equal merit and 
 the evidence shows gaps. Thus we know much of the political 
 and racial conditions, but little of the biological and physical. 
 It has, therefore, been possible, by elaborating one of these 
 aspects at the expense of the rest, to produce quite plausible 
 theories to explain the downfall of Greek culture. It has been 
 explained often on political grounds as the natural decadence 
 of societies which were politically corrupt and unstable ; 
 Thucydides in his account of the Corcyrean revolt gives the 
 hint. 
 
 Biological reasons have been suggested, as, for instance, that 
 the purity of Greek stock was early contaminated, leading later 
 to a lowering of the standard. One recent suggestion x places 
 the beginning of the decadence as early as Cleisthenes, when 
 Athens, destined by the purity of her stock and her elaborate 
 tribal system of inbreeding to be the leader of Hellas, broke 
 her traditions by admitting foreigners in large numbers to the 
 citizenship. The result of this was a thinning out of her stock 
 and a weakening of her national character which became 
 evident within two generations. 
 
 Racial reasons are also adduced. Here the commencement 
 of the decay is put later. The rise of the kingdom of Macedon 
 led to the infusion of Greek blood with a barbarian strain and 
 to the weakening of manners and morals by the adoption of 
 Macedonian and Oriental customs. 2 
 
 1 See ' Presidential Address ' of the British Association for the Advance- 
 ment of Science, Report, 1914, p. 34. 
 
 2 This seems the view of Ferguson in his Hellenistic Athens. 
 
go Ancient Greece 
 
 Explanations are suggested on physical grounds. There are 
 general reasons of climatic change that affected the character 
 of the people. During the last century B.C. and the early 
 centuries of the Christian era there is believed to have been 
 a period of marked aridity in Europe and Asia. Such a change 
 would have led to unrest and suffering which in turn would have 
 produced political changes. 1 
 
 Special reasons may also have operated. The appearance of 
 malaria in Greece at a fairly early time is held by many to have 
 affected the minds and morals of the Greeks so severely that 
 they were never able subsequently to recover their original 
 vigour. Exponents of this theory find proof in the decadence 
 and despondency which are evident in the Literature and 
 Philosophy of Hellenistic times and in the decay of morals 
 and taste which seems to have set in by the fourth and third 
 centuries B.C. 2 
 
 While all these explanations are interesting, none seems either 
 satisfactory or adequate. On the other hand, none of them 
 seems false. 
 
 It seems safer to combine them all without giving the 
 obviously weaker theories an undue predominance. Greek 
 political systems had indeed become corrupt by the end of the 
 Peloponnesian War. The Spartan pretence of freeing the late 
 dependencies of Athens was but a travesty of her original 
 intentions. The foundation of the second Athenian Empire 
 which resulted from the collapse of Spartan idealism was no 
 more honest or ideal than the campaign of the Spartan com- 
 missioners after the fall of Athens. The intrigues of Greek 
 states with Persia at the close of the Peloponnesian War and 
 their bargaining with barbarian Thracians and Macedonians 
 
 1 See Elsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia. 
 
 2 See Ross and Jones, Malaria and Greek History. 
 
Ancient Greece 91 
 
 during the first half of the fourth century show the level to 
 which Greek nationalism had sunk. The great days were 
 indeed over. This was directly the result of thirty demoralizing 
 years of war and hatred. 
 
 To this political decadence the decadence of stock had 
 undoubtedly contributed to some limited extent. Greece of 
 the sixth century was a little world of heroes and artists of the 
 bluest blood and the highest ambitions ; but it yet has to be 
 proved that the introduction of new blood did not bring as 
 much benefit as it caused damage to the older stock. Thucy- 
 dides himself, who was in character most characteristic of his 
 time, was born of a Thracian mother, and many of the most 
 prominent men of the fifth century had foreign blood in their 
 veins. 
 
 The rise of the kingdom of Macedon brought great changes 
 of character and of outlook in Greece, but they were changes 
 of degree rather than of kind, for there is no adequate reason 
 yet for believing that the Macedonians were not of the same 
 stock as that from which the Greeks were for the most part 
 sprung. Besides, the stock of Macedon, if uncouth and 
 apparently barbaric, was at any rate vigorous and not decadent. 
 No more brilliant group of men has ever been seen in so short 
 a period of history than Alexander and his companions. Only 
 in so far as the new vigour of the Macedonians destroyed the 
 old vigour of Greece and left the destinies of the world in the 
 hands of a few young and ambitious men can it be said that 
 Macedon contributed to the break-up of Greece. 
 
 Of malaria and such special causes our evidence is unreliable 
 and largely unsafe. We are told that the disease had taken 
 a firm hold of Central Greece by the fourth century b.c. Yet 
 we find the plain of Marathon, where to-day the inhabitants 
 are 100 per cent, malarial, was the country estate and contained 
 
92 Ancient Greece 
 
 the country house of Herodes Atticus, the millionaire, at a date 
 as late as the second century a. d., a fact which renders it most 
 unlikely that Attica was seriously malarial even at that late date. 
 
 On the other hand, the great Plague of Athens and all the 
 campaigning diseases must have gone far to undermine the 
 stamina of the Greeks at the end of the fifth century and the 
 foreign campaigns of the fourth must have introduced fresh 
 complaints. It is noteworthy that all the great healing 
 sanctuaries of Asklepios begin to flourish only in the fourth 
 century. 
 
 General causes, such as changes of climatic conditions, seem 
 to be substantiated in fact, and must be taken seriously into 
 consideration as long as they are considered only as contributory 
 causes. 
 
 The Greek was thus at the mercy of certain conditions, over 
 some of which he had no control. His decadence and the collapse 
 of the culture which he had initiated were due, it seems, to the 
 same causes as those which made the outbreak of the Pelopon- 
 nesian War inevitable, and of these the most cogent was the 
 fact^Ehafhis race was outstripping its neighbours just as Athens 
 had begun to outstrip her sister states. A great city cannot 
 thrive in a wilderness unless it conquers the wilderness ; if it 
 does not prevail, the wilderness comes once more into its own. 
 Greece-stood for a while like an embattled city set in a desert 
 of barbarism. She had none of the material means of ensuring 
 her position, and she neglected even the weeds that sprang up 
 within her own walls. Gradually, tower by tower, her battle- 
 ments fell and there were none to rebuild them. 
 
 
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The bibliography is not intended to be complete. Its purpose is to indicate 
 a course of reading that will cover most periods without too much specializa- 
 tion. 
 
 Prehistory. 
 
 Crete and Mycenae. 
 
 The Discoveries in Crete. R. M. Burrows. (John Murray, 1907.) 
 Crete the Forerunner of Greece. C. H. and H. Hawes. (Harper, 1909.) 
 The Dawn of History. J. L. Myres. (Williams & Norgate.) 
 
 The Dark Ages. 
 
 The Early Age of Greece. W. Ridgeway. (Camb. Univ. Press.) 
 Ionia and the East. D. G. Hogarth. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1909.) 
 
 History. Sixth to fifth century b.c. 
 
 A History of Greece from the Time of Solon to 403 x.c. G. Grote. 
 Edited by J. M. Mitchell and M. O. B. Caspari. (Routledge, 1907.) 
 Fourth to third century b.c 
 
 From Pericles to Philip. T. R. Glover. (Methuen, 191 7.) 
 Hellenistic Athens. W. S. Ferguson. (Macmillan, 191 1.) 
 Greek Imperialism. W. S. Ferguson. (Constable, 191 3.) 
 Philip and Alexander. D. G. Hogarth. (Murray, 1897.) 
 Second to first century b.c. 
 
 Greece under the Romans. G. Finlay. (1844.) 
 General. 
 *Greek History. A. J. Toynbee. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1921.) 
 * Greek Political Thought. A. E. Zimmern. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1921.) 
 
 Art. 
 
 A Handbook of Greek Sculpture. E. A. Gardner. (Macmillan, 1914.) 
 Principles of Greek Art. P.Gardner. (Macmillan, 19 14.) 
 
 • Hellenistic Sculpture. G. Dickins. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1920.) 
 *TheLampsof Greek Art. P.Gardner. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1921.) 
 
 Literature. 
 
 A History of Ancient Greek Literature. G. Murray. (Heinemann, 
 
 1902.) 
 The Athenian Drama. G.Murray. (Allen, 191 1.) 
 The Attic Orators. R. C. Jebb. (1876.) 
 *Greek Literature. R. W. Livingstone. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1921.) 
 
 Architecture. 
 
 Greek Architecture. A. Marquand. (Macmillan, 1909.) 
 Hellenic Architecture. E. Bell. (Bell, 1920.) 
 *Greek Architecture. Sir R. Blomfield. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1921.) 
 
 * These essays are included in The Legacy of Greece, edited by R. W. Living- 
 stone. (Oxford Univ. Press, 192 1.) 
 
94 Select Bibliography 
 
 Religion. 
 
 Ancient Art and Ritual. J. E. Harrison. (Williams & Norgate.) 
 Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 
 
 I9°3-) 
 
 * Greek Religion. W. R. Inge. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1921.) 
 
 Science. 
 
 Greek Science and Modern Science. C. Singer. (London Univ. Press, 
 
 1920.) 
 *Greek Mathematics and Astronomy. Sir T. Heath. (Oxford Univ. 
 
 Press, 1 921.) 
 *Greek Natural Science. D'Arcy W. Thompson. (Oxford Univ. Press, 
 
 1921.) 
 *Greek Biology. C. Singer. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1921.) 
 
 * Greek Medicine. C. Singer. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1 921.) 
 
 Philosophy. 
 
 Greek Philosophy. J. Burnet. (Macmillan, 1914.) 
 *Greek Philosophy. J. Burnet. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1921.) 
 
 General. 
 
 A Companion to Greek Studies. (Cambridge, 1906.) 
 
 The Greek Genius and its Meaning to us. R. W. Livingstone. (Oxford 
 
 Univ. Press, 191 5.) 
 The Greek Commonwealth. A. E. Zimmern. (Oxford Univ. Press, 
 
 1911.) 
 The Greek Tradition. J. A. K. Thompson. (Allen & Unwin, 191 5.) 
 Greeks and Barbarians. J. A. K. Thompson. (Allen & Unwin, 1921.) 
 The Pulse of Asia. E.Huntington. (Houghton Mifflin, 1907.) 
 *The Value of Greece to the Future of the World. G. Murray. (Oxford 
 
 Univ. Press, 1921.) 
 
 Maps. 
 
 Murray's Classical Maps. (Graecia, Asia Minor, and Italia.) 
 
 * These essays are included in The Legacy of Greece, edited by R. W. Living- 
 stone. (Oxford Univ. Press, 192 1.) 
 
NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Frontispiece. Head of a youth from Beneventum, now in the Louvre 
 at Paris. The head is in bronze and comes, in all probability, from a com- 
 plete bronze statue. It is in the finest style of the middle of the fifth 
 century b.c. and belongs to the Attic school. It shows the ideal type of 
 Greek sculpture and, both in conception and in technique, is representative 
 of the best that Greek art produced. 
 
 On title-page. Small bronze figure, probably a dedication from one of 
 the shrines on the Acropolis, representing a winged Victory. This figure is 
 one of the finest small Greek bronzes of the sixth century and belongs to 
 the Ionic school of art. It was probably made at Athens during the govern- 
 ment of Peisistratus or that of his sons and belongs to the period 530 to 
 520 b. c. It is now in the National Museum at Athens. 
 
 The Thracian coast looking eastwards from the site of an ancient town 
 near the mouth of the river Hebrus. The town was probably Mesembria, 
 near Maroneia, and is situated about a hundred feet above the sea on a fertile 
 plateau, (p. 18.) 
 
 The gulf of Nauplia and the plain of Argos from Mycenae. The town in 
 the plain at the right of the picture is Argos with its citadel rising above 
 it. The cliff at the left of the picture is the citadel of Nauplia. The time 
 is early spring. (From a watercolour now in the Ashmolean Museum, 
 Oxford. There is a large copy in oils of this picture now at Trinity 
 College, Cambridge. Another copy in water-colours is in private possession 
 at Oxford.) (p. 25.) 
 
 Mount Oeta seen from Lamia. The view is taken from a hill just west 
 of Lamia and looks towards the west. To the right of the picture the 
 Spercheius valley runs up into Aetolia. In front is the plain of Malis, 
 through which the river Spercheius flows. At the back rises Mount Oeta, 
 the most formidable barrier that guards the entry into Greece. Two ways 
 only lead past it, one on the east round its eastern end and through the 
 pass of Thermopylae, another directly through its foothills near Thermo- 
 pylae by way of the Asopus ravine. The former is the only route practicable 
 for an army. (From a photo by M. C. Picard.) (p. 27.) 
 
96 Notes on the Illustrations 
 
 An olive grove in Attica. This is a characteristic scene in the plains of j 
 Attica. The trees are about twenty years old. (p. 39.) 
 
 The plain of Sparta, looking south-west. The view is taken from thel 
 acropolis of Sparta near the Roman theatre. The modern town of Sparta j 
 lies in the plain.on the left of the picture. Mount Taygetus rises above the 
 plain on the right. The picture was painted in the spring and the snow is 
 still on Taygetus. (From a watercolour by Edward Lear, now in the I 
 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.) (p. 47.) 
 
 The Parthenon. The view is taken from inside the building facing towards ! 
 the north-east. The hill of Lycabettus is seen in the background. The ] 
 columns in the foreground represent the* north-eastern corner of the Par- j 
 thenon. (p. 51.) 
 
 The city«©f'-Ghalkis in Eu.hpea. To the left of the town is seen the old ! 
 bridge over the Euripus and- the mediaeval castle which guarded it. This 
 castle is now destroyed. The mountain at the right of the picture is Mount 
 Dirphys. The picture is taken from the coast of Boeotia, not far from the 
 bay of Aulis. The time is about midsummer. (From a watercolour by 
 Edward Lear, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.) (p. 55.) 
 
 The temple of Olympian Zeus just east of the Acropolis at Athens. This 
 temple was commenced in the time of Peisistratusin the sixth century B.C., 
 but remained unfinished until the time of Hadrian in the second century 
 a. d. The existing columns belong to the latter period. 
 
 Behind the temple rises Mount Hymettus, covered with snow. The time 
 is winter, (p. 63.) 
 
 The bay and plain of Marathon from the northern slopes of Mount 
 Pentelicus. The hills of Euboea are seen in the distance. The Persian 
 fleet anchored in the sickle-shaped bay, and the battle was fought in the 
 plain adjoining. (From a Watercolour by Edward Lear, now in the 
 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.) (p. 78.) 
 
 Mount Ida in Crete, seen from the west. The foreground shows the 
 well-wooded nature of this part of Crete. (From a watercolour by Edward 
 Lear, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.) (p. 86.) 
 
 Printed in England at the Oxford University Press