latter in shameless impudence pleads that she has saved Greece from invasion and that Love who came with Paris to Sparta was the cause of her fault. Hecuba ridicules the idea that Hera and Artemis could desire any prize of beauty. It was lust of Trojan gold that tempted Helen; never once was she known to bewail her sin in Troy, rather she always tried to attract men’s eyes. Such a woman’s death would be a crown of glory to Greece. Menelaus says her fate will be decided in Argos. Talthybius brings in the body of Astyanax, over which Hecuba bursts into a lament of exceptional beauty and then passes out to slavery.
In this drama Euripides draws upon all his resources of pathos. It is a succession of brilliantly conceived sorrows. Cassandra’s exulting prophecy of the revenge she is to bring is one of the great things in Euripides. In this play we have a most vivid picture of the destructive effects of evil, an inevitable consequence of which it is that the woman, however innocent she may be, always pays. Hecuba drank the cup of bereavement to the very last drop.
The _Electra_, acted about 418, is characteristic. Electra has been compelled to marry a Mycenean labourer, a man of noble instincts who respects the princess and treats her as such. Both enter the scene; the man goes to labour for Electra, “for no lazy man by merely having God’s name on his lips can make a livelihood without toil”. Orestes and Pylades at first imagine Electra to be a servant; learning the truth they come forward and question her. She tells the story of her mother’s shame and Aegisthus’ insolence which Orestes promises to recount to her brother, “for in ignorant men there is no spark of pity anywhere, only in the learned.” The labourer returns and by his speech moves Orestes to declare that birth is no test of nobility. Electra sends him to fetch an old Tutor of her father to make ready for her two guests; he departs remarking that there is just enough food in the house for one day.
The old Tutor arrives in tears; he has found a lock of hair on Agamemnon’s tomb. Gazing intently on the two strangers, he recognises Orestes by a scar on the eyebrow. They then proceed to plot the death of their enemies. Orestes goes to meet Aegisthus is close by sacrificing, and presently returns with the corpse, at which Electra hurls back the taunts and jeers he had heaped on her in his lifetime. She had sent to her mother saying she had given birth to a boy and asking her to come immediately.
Orestes quails before the coming murder, but Electra bids him be loyal to his father. Clytemnestra on her arrival querulously defends her past, alleging as her pretext not the death of Iphigeneia but the presence of a rival, Cassandra. Electra after refuting her invites her inside the wretched hut to offer sacrifice for her newly born child, where she is slain by Orestes. At the end of the play the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, bid Pylades marry Electra, tell Orestes he will be purified in Athens and prophesy that Menelaus and Helen, just arrived from Egypt, will bury Agisthus real Helen never went to Troy, a wraith of her being sent there with Paris.
The startling realism of this drama is apparent. The poverty of Electra, the more certain identification of Orestes by a scar than by a lock of hair, the mention of Cassandra as the real motive for the murder of Agamemnon all indicate that Euripides was not content with the accepted legend. His Clytemnestra is a feeble creation even by the side of that of Sophocles.
Stesichorus in a famous poem tells how Helen blinded him for maligning her; she never went to Troy; it was a wraith which accompanied Paris. Such is the central idea of a very strange play, the _Helen_. The scene is in Egypt. Teucer, banished by his father, meets the real Helen; to her amazement he tells of her evil reputation and of the great war before Troy, adding that Menelaus is sailing home with another Helen. The latter enters, to learn that he is in Egypt, where the real Helen has lived for the last seventeen years. Warned by a prophetess Theonoe that her husband is not far off, Helen comes to be reunited to him. A messenger from the coast announces that the wraith has faded into nothingness.
Helen then warns Menelaus of her difficult position. She is wooed by Theoclymenus, king of the land, brother of Theonoe. Menelaus in despair thinks of killing himself and Helen to escape the tyrant. Theonoe holds their fate in her hands; Helen pleads with her; “It is shameful that thou shouldest know things divine, and not righteousness.” Menelaus declares his intention of living and dying with his wife. The prophetess leaves them to discover some means of escape which Helen devises. Pretending that Menelaus is a messenger bringing news of her husband’s death at sea, she persuades the tyrant to provide a ship and rowers that Helen may perform the last rites to the dead on the element where he died. At the right moment the Greek sailors overpowered the rowers and sailed home with the united pair.
Very commonly real drama suffers the fate which has overtaken it in this piece; it declines into melodrama. Here are to be found all the stock melodramatic features–a bold hero, a scheming beauty, a confidante, a dupe, the murder of a ship’s crew. Massinger piloted Elizabethan drama to a similar end. Given an uncritical audience melodrama is the surest means of filling the house. Reality matters little in such work; the facts of life are like Helen’s wraith, when they become unmanageable they vanish into thin air.
About 412 the _Iphigeneia in Tauris_ appeared. South Russia was the seat of a cult of Artemis; the goddess spirited Iphigeneia to the place when her father sacrificed her at Aulis. Orestes, bidden by Apollo to steal an image of the goddess to get his final purification, comes on the stage with Pylades; on seeing the temple they are convinced of the impossibility of burgling it. A shepherd describes to Iphigeneia their capture, for strangers were taken and offered to the goddess without exception. One of the two was seized with a vision of the avenging deities; attacked by a band of peasants both were overpowered after a stubborn resistance. Formerly Iphigeneia had pitied the Greeks who landed there; now, warned of Orestes’ death by a dream, she determines to kill without mercy. One of them shall die, the other taking back to Greece a letter. Orestes insists on dying himself, reminding Pylades of his duty to Electra. When the letter is brought Pylades swears to fulfil his word, but asks what is to happen if the ship is wrecked. Iphigeneia reads the letter to him; it is addressed to Orestes and tells of his sister’s weary exile. After the recognition is completed, Orestes relates the horrors of his life and begs his sister to help him to steal the all-important image.
Thoas, the King of the land, learns from her that the two Greeks are guilty of kindred murder; their presence has defiled the holy image which needs purification in the sea as well as the criminals. The priestess obtains permission to bind the captives and take the image to be cleansed with private mystic rites. The plot succeeds; Orestes’ ship puts in; after a struggle the three board it, carrying the image with them. Thoas is prevented from pursuit by an intervention of Athena.
Goethe used this play for his drama of the same name; he made Thoas the lover of Iphigeneia, whom he represents as the real image whom Orestes is to remove. Her departure is not compassed by a stratagem, but is permitted by the King, a man of singular nobility and self-denial.
The _Phaenissae_ has been much admired in all ages. Jocasta tells how after the discovery of his identity Oedipus blinded himself but was shut up by his two sons whom he cursed for their impiety. Eteocles then usurped the rule while Polyneices called an Argive host to attack Thebes. A Choral description of this army is succeeded by an unexpected entry into the city of Polyneices who meets his mother and tells her of his life in exile. She sends for Eteocles in the hope of reconciling her two sons. Polyneices promises to disband his forces if he is restored to his rights, but Eteocles, enamoured of power, refuses to surrender it. Jocasta vainly points out to him the burden of rule, nor can she persuade Polyneices not to attack his own land.
When the champions have taken up their position at the gates, Teiresias tells Creon that Thebes can be saved by the sacrifice of his own son Menoeceus. Creon refuses to comply and urges his son to escape. Pretending to obey Menoeceus threw himself from the city walls. The struggle at the gates is followed by a challenge to Polyneices issued by Eteocles to settle the dispute in single combat. Jocasta and Antigone rush out to intervene, too late. They find the two lying side by side at death’s door. Eteocles is past speech, but Polyneices bids farewell to his mother and sister, pitying his brother “who turned friendship into enmity, yet still was dear”. In agony, Jocasta slays herself over her sons’ bodies.
Led in by Antigone, Oedipus is banished by Creon, who forbids the burial of Polyneices. After touching the dead Jocasta and his two sons, he passes to exile and rest at Colonus.
The harsh story favoured by Sophocles has been greatly humanised by Euripides, who could not accept all the savagery of the received legend. Apart from the unexplained presence of Polyneices in the city, the plot is excellent. The speeches are vigorous and natural, the characters thoroughly human. The criticising and refining influence of Euripides is manifest throughout, together with a simple and noble pathos.
An ancient critic says of the _Orestes_, written in 408, “the drama is popular but of the lowest morality; except Pylades, all are villains”. Electra meets Helen, unexpectedly returned from Egypt to Argos with Menelaus, who sends her daughter Hermione with offerings to the tomb of Agamemnon. Electra’s opinion of her is vividly expressed.
“See how she has tricked out her hair, preserving her beauty; she is old Helen still. Heaven abhor thee, the bane of me and my brother and Greece.”
The Chorus accidentally awakens Orestes who is visited by a wild vision of haunting Furies. When he regains sanity he begs the assistance of Menelaus, his last refuge. His uncle, a broken reed, is saved from committing himself by the entry of Tyndareus, father of Clytemnestra and Helen. He righteously rebukes the bloodthirsty Orestes, though he is aware of the evil in his two daughters. Orestes breaks out into an insulting speech which alienates completely his grandfather. Menelaus, when appealed to again, hurries out to try to win him back.
Pylades suggests that he and Orestes should plead their case before the Argive Assembly, which was to try them for murder of Clytemnestra. A very brilliant and exciting account of the debate tells how the case was lost by Orestes himself, who presumed to lecture the audience on the majesty of the law he himself had broken. He and Electra are condemned to be stoned that very day. Determined to ruin Menelaus before they die, they agree to kill Helen, the cause of all their troubles, and to fire the fortified house in which they live. Electra adds that they should also seize Hermione and hold her as a check on Menelaus’ fury for the death of Helen. The girl is easily trapped as she rushes into the house hearing her mother’s cries for help. Soon after a Trojan menial drops from the first story. He tells how Helen and Hermione have so far escaped death, but the rest is unknown to him. In a ghastly scene Orestes hunts the wretch over the stage, but finally lets him go as he is not a fit victim for a free man’s sword. Almost immediately the house is seen to be ablaze; Menelaus rushes up in a frenzy, but is checked by the sight of Orestes with Hermione in his arms. When Menelaus calls for help, Orestes bids Pylades and Electra light more fires to consume them all. A timely appearance of Apollo with Helen deified by his side saves the situation.
It is plain that Euripides has here completely rejected the old legend. He never makes Orestes even think of pleading Apollo’s command to him to slay his mother. He is concerned with the defence which a contemporary matricide might make before a modern Athenian assembly and with the fitting doom of self-destruction which would overtake him. Like _Vanity Fair_, the play shows us the life of people who try to do without God.
The _Bacchae_ is one of Euripides’ best plays. In the absence of Pentheus the King, Cadmus and Teiresias join in the worship of the new god Dionysus at Thebes. Pentheus returns to find that noble women, including Agave, his own mother, have joined the strange cult brought to the place by a mysterious Lydian stranger “whose hair is neatly arranged in curls, his face like wine, his eyes as full of grace as Aphrodite’s”.
Teiresias advises him to welcome the god, Cadmus to pretend that he is divine, even if he is only a mortal; this new religion is the natural outlet of the desire for innocent revelry born in both sexes. The Lydian is arrested and brought before Pentheus, whom he warns that the god will save him from insult, but Pentheus hurries him away into a dungeon.
The Chorus of Bacchae are alarmed on hearing a tumult. The stranger appears to tell how Pentheus was made mad by Dionysus in the act of imprisoning him. The King in amazement sees his prisoner standing free before him and becomes furiously angry on hearing that his mother has joined a new revel on Mount Cithaeron. The stranger suggests that he should go disguised as a Bacchante to see the new worship. When he appears transformed, the Lydian comments with exquisite and deadly irony on his appearance. His fate is vividly and terribly painted. Placing him in a pine, the stranger suddenly disappeared, while the voice of Dionysus summoned the rout to punish the spy. Rushing to the tree, the woman tore it up by the roots and then rent Pentheus piecemeal, Agave herself leading them on.
She comes in holding what she imagines to be a trophy. Cadmus slowly reveals to her the horror of her deed, the proof of which is her son’s head in her grasp. Dionysus himself comes in to point out that this tragedy is the result of the indignity which Thebes put upon him and his mother Semele. Broken with grief, Agave passes out slowly to her banishment. The Bacchae was composed in Macedonia; it contains all the mystery of the supernatural. Dionysus’ character is admirably drawn, while the infatuation of Pentheus is a fitting prelude to his ruin. The cult of Dionysus was essentially democratic, intended for those who could claim no share in aristocratic ritual: hence its popularity and prevalence. We may regard the Bacchae as the poet’s declaration of faith in the worship which gave Europe the Drama; it is altogether fitting that he who has left us the greatest number of tragedies should have been chosen by destiny to bequeath us the one drama which tells of one of the adventures of its patron deity.
The _Iphigeneia in Aulis_ was written in the last year of the poet’s life. Agamemnon sends a private letter to his wife countermanding an official dispatch summoning her and Iphigeneia. This letter is intercepted by Menelaus, who upbraids his brother; later, seeing his distress, he advises him to send the women home again. But public opinion forces the leader to obey Artemis and sacrifice his daughter. When he meets his wife and child, he tries to temporise but fails. Achilles meets Clytemnestra and is surprised to hear that he is to marry Iphigeneia, such being the bait which brought Clytemnestra to Aulis. Learning the real truth, she faces her husband, pleading for their daughter’s life. Iphigeneia at first shrinks from death; the army demands her sacrifice, while Achilles is ready to defend her. The knot is untied by Iphigeneia herself, who willingly at last consents to die to save her country.
This excellent play shows no falling in dramatic power; it was imitated by Racine and Schiller. The figures are intensely human, the conflict of duties firmly outlined, the pathos sincere and true, there is no divine appearance to straighten out a tangled plot. Thus Euripides’ career ends as it began, with a story of a woman’s noble self-sacrifice.
The poet’s popularity is indicated by the number of his extant dramas and fragments, both of which exceed in bulk the combined work of Aeschylus and Sophocles. All classes of writers quoted him, philosophers, orators, bishops. In his own lifetime Socrates made a point of witnessing his plays; the very violence of Aristophanes’ attack proves Euripides’ potent influence; his lost drama _Melanippe_ turned the heads of the Athenians, the whole town singing its odes. Survivors of the Sicilian disaster won their freedom by singing his songs to their captors, returning to thank their liberator in person; the fragments of Menander discovered in 1906 contain many reminiscences of him, even slaves quoting passages of him to their masters. For it was the very width of his appeal that made him universally loved; women and slaves in his view were every whit as good as free-born men, sometimes they were far nobler. If drama is the voice of a democracy, the Athenians had found a more democratic mouthpiece than they had bargained for.
With the educated men it was different. They suspected a poet who was upsetting their tradition. Besides, they were asked to crown a person who told them in play after play that they were really like Jason, Menelaus, Polymestor, poor creatures if not quite odious. He made them see with painful clearness that the better sex was the one which they despised, yet which was sure one day to find the utterance to which it had a right in virtue of its greater nobility. The feminism of Euripides is evident through his whole career; it is an insult to our powers of reading to imagine that he was a woman-hater. It is then not to be wondered at that he won the prize only five times, and it can hardly be an accident that he gained it once with the Hippolytus, which on a surface view condemns the female sex.
For the officials could not see that Euripides was not a man only, he was a spirit of development. Privilege and narrowness in every form he hated; he demanded unlimited freedom for the intelligence. The narrow circle of legends, the conventional unified drama, state religion, a pseudo-democracy based on slavery he fearlessly criticised. Rationalism, humanism, free speculation were his watchwords; he was always trying new experiments in his art, introducing politics, philosophy, melodrama and trying to get rid of the chorus wherever he could. He was a living and a contemporary Proteus, pleading like an advocate in a lawsuit, discussing political theory, restating unsolved problems in modern form and seasoning his work with his own peculiar and often elevating pathos. Such a man was anathema to conservative Athens.
But to us he is one of ourselves. He exactly hits off our modern taste, with its somewhat sentimental tendency, its scepticism, love of excitement, and its great complexity. We know we have many moods and passions which strangely blend and thwart each other; these we treat in our novels, and Euripides’ plays are a sort of novel, but for the divine appearances in the last scenes. He shows us the inevitable end of actions of beings exactly like ourselves, acting from merely human motives, neither higher nor lower than we, though perhaps disguised under heroic names. He is in a word the first modern poet.
TRANSLATIONS:
A. S. Way, Loeb Series. This verse translation is the most successful; it renders the choric odes with skill.
Professor Gilbert Murray has published verse translations of various plays. He is an authority on the text. His volume on Euripides in the Home University Library is admirable.
_Euripides the Rationalist_ and _Four Plays of Euripides_ by A. W. Verrall are well known; the latter is particularly stimulating. The views it expounds are original but not traditional.
See Symonds’ _Greek Poets_ as above.
ARISTOPHANES
At the end of the _Symposium_ Plato represents Socrates as convincing both Agathon, a tragedian, and Aristophanes that the writer of tragedy will be able to write comedy also. That the two forms are not wholly divorced is clear from the history of ancient drama itself: Each dramatist competed with four plays, three tragedies and a Satyric drama. What this last is can be plainly seen in the _Cyclops_ of Euripides, which relates in comic form the adventures of Odysseus and Silenus in the monster’s company. Further, the tendency of tragedy was inevitably towards comedy. The extant work of Aeschylus and Sophocles is not without comic touches; but the trend is clearer in Euripides who was an innovator in this as in many other matters. Laughter and tears are neighbours; a happy ending is not tragic; loosely connected scenes are the essence of Old Comedy, and loosely written tragic dialogue (common in Euripides’ later work) closely resembles the language of comedy, which is practically prose in verse form. The debt which later comedy owed to Euripides is great; reminiscences of him abound; he is quoted directly and indirectly; his stage tricks are adopted and his realistic characters are the very population of the Comic stage.
The logically developed plot is the characteristic of serious drama. Old Comedy, its antithesis, is often a succession of scenes in which the connection is loose without being impossible. In it the unexpected is common, for it is an escape from the conventions of ordinary life, a thing of causes and effects. It might be more accurate to say that farce is a better description of the work which is associated with the name of Aristophanes.
This writer was born about 448, was a member of the best Athenian society of the day, quickly took the first place as the writer of comedy and died about 385. He saw the whole of the Peloponnesian war and has given us a most vivid account of the passions it aroused and its effect on Athenian life. He first won the prize in 425, when he produced the _Acharnians_ under an assumed name. Pericles had died in 429; the horrors of war were beginning to make themselves felt; the Spartans were invading Attica, cutting down the fruit-trees and compelling the country folk to stream into the city. One of these, Dicaeopolis enters the stage. It is early morning; he is surprised that there is no popular meeting on the appointed day. He loathes the town and longs for his village; he had intended to heckle the speakers if they discussed anything but peace. Ambassadors from foreign nations are announced; seeing them he conceives the daring project of making a separate peace with the Spartan for eight drachmae. His servant returns with three peaces of five, ten and thirty years; he chooses the last.
A chorus of angry Acharnians rush in to catch the traitor; they are charcoal burners ruined by the invasion. Dicaeopolis seizes a charcoal basket, threatening to destroy it if they touch him. Anxious to spare their townsman, the basket, they consent to hear his defence, which he offers to make with his neck on an executioner’s block. He is afraid of the noisy patriotism appealed to by mob-orators and of the lust for condemning the accused which is the weakness of older men. Choosing from Euripides’ wardrobe the rags in which Telephus was arrayed to rouse the audience to pity, he boldly ventures to plead the cause of the Spartans, though he hates them for destroying his trees. He asserts that “Olympian Pericles who thundered and lightened and confounded Greece” caused the war by putting an embargo on the food of their neighbour Megara, his pretext being a mere private quarrel.
The Chorus are divided; his opponents send for Lamachus, the swashbuckling general; the latter is discomfited and Dicaeopolis immediately opens a market with the Peloponnesians, Megarians and Boeotians, but not with Lamachus. In an important choral ode the poet justifies his existence. By his criticism he puts a stop to the foreign embassies which dupe the Athenians; he checks flattery and folly; he never bribes nor hoodwinks them, but exposes their harsh treatment of their subjects and their love of condemning on groundless charges the older generation which had fought at Marathon.
The play ends with a trading scene; a Boeotian in exchange for Copaic eels takes an Athenian informer, an article unknown in Boeotia. Lamachus returns wounded while Dicaeopolis departs in happy contrast to celebrate a feast of rustic jollity.
Aristophanes’ chief butts were Cleon, Socrates and Euripides; the last is treated with good nature in this play. To modern readers the comedy is important for two reasons; first, it attacks the strange belief that a democracy must necessarily love peace; Aristophanes found it as full of the lust for battle as any other form of government; all it needed was a Lamachus to rattle a sword. Again, the unfailing source of war is plainly indicated, trade rivalry. War will continue as long as there are markets to capture and rivals to exclude from them.
In the next year, 424, Aristophanes produced the _Knights_, the most violent political lampoon in literature. The victim was Cleon who had succeeded Pericles as popular leader. He was at the height of his glory, having captured the Spartan contingent at Pylos, prisoners who were of great importance for diplomatic purposes. The comedy is a scathing criticism of democracy; the subject is so controversial that it will be best to give some extracts without comment.
Two servants of Demos (the People) steal the oracles of the Paphlagonian (the babbler, Cleon) while he is asleep. To their joy they find that he will govern Demos’ house only until a more abominable than he shall appear, namely a sausage-seller. That person immediately presenting himself is informed of his high calling. At first he is amazed. “I know nothing of refinement except letters, and them, bad as they are, badly.” The answer is:
“Your only fault is that you know them badly; mob-leadership has nothing to do with a man refined or of good character, rather with an ignoramus and a vile fellow.”
To his objection that he cannot look after a democracy the reply is,
“it is easy enough; only go on doing what you are doing now. Mix and chop up everything; always bring the mob over by sweetening it with a few cook-shop terms. You have all the other qualifications, a nasty voice, a low origin, familiarity with the street.”
The Paphlagonian Cleon runs in bawling that they are conspiring against the democracy. They call loudly for the Knights, who enter as the Chorus to assist them against Cleon, encouraging the sausage-seller to show the brazen effrontery which is the mob-orator’s sole protection, and to prove that a decent upbringing is meaningless. Nothing loth, he redoubles Cleon’s vulgarity on his head. Cleon rushes out intending to inform the Upper House of their treasons; the sausage-seller hurries after him, his neck being well oiled with his own lard to make Cleon’s slanders slip off. A splendid ode is sung in the meantime; it contains a half-comic account of Aristophanes’ training in his art and a panegyric on the old spirit which made Athens great. The sausage-seller returns to tell of Cleon’s utter defeat; he is quickly followed by Cleon, who appeals to Demos himself, pointing out his own services.
“At the first, when I was a member of the Council, I got in vast sums for the Treasury, partly by torture, partly by throttling, partly by begging. I never studied any private person’s interest if I could only curry favour with you, to make you master of all Greece.”
The sausage-seller refutes him.
“Your object was to steal and take bribes from the cities, to blind Demos to your villainies by the dust of war, and to make him gape after you in need and necessity for war-pensions. If Demos can only get into the country in peace and taste the barley-cakes again, he will soon find out of what blessings you have rid him by your briberies; he will come back as a dour farmer and will hunt up a vote which will condemn you.”
Cleon, the new Themistocles, is deposed from his stewardship.
He appeals to some oracles of Bacis, but the sausage-seller has better ones of Bacis’ elder brother Glanis. The Chorus rebuke Demos, whom all men fear as absolute, for being easily led, for listening to the newest comer and for a perpetual banishment of his intelligence. In a second contest for Demos’ favours Cleon is finally beaten when it appears that he has kept some dainties in his box while the sausage-seller has given his all. An appeal to an oracle prophesying his supplanter–one who can steal, commit perjury and face it out–so clearly applies to the sausage-seller that Cleon retires.
After a brief absence Demos appears with his new friend–but it is a different Demos, rid of his false evidence and jury system, the Demos of fifty years before. He is ashamed of his recent history, of his preferring doles to battleships. He promises a speedy reform, full pay to his sailors, strict revision of the army service rolls, an embargo on Bills of Parliament. To his joy he recovers the Thirty Years’ peace which Cleon had hidden away, and realises at last his longing to escape from the city into the country.
This violent attack on Cleon was vigorously met; Aristophanes was prosecuted and seems to have made a compromise. In his next comedy, the _Clouds_ (which was presented in 423) he changes his victim. Strepsiades, an old Athenian, married a high-born wife of expensive tastes; their son Pheidippides developed a liking for horses and soon brought his father to the edge of ruin. The latter requests the son to save him by joining the academy conducted by Socrates, where he can learn the worse argument which enables its possessor to win his case. Aided by it he can rid his father of debt. As the son flatly refuses, the old man decides to learn it himself. Entering the school he sees maps and drawings of all kinds and finally descries Socrates himself, far above his head in a basket, high among the clouds, studying the sun. Strepsiades begs him to teach him the Worse Argument at his own price. After initiating him, Socrates summons his deities the Clouds, who enter as the Chorus. These are the guardian deities of modern professors, seers, doctors, lazy long-haired long-nailed fellows, musicians who cultivate trills and tremolos, transcendental quacks who sing their praises. The old gods are dethroned, a vortex governing the universe. The Chorus tells Socrates to take the old man and teach him everything.
The ode which follows contains the poet’s claim to be original.
“I never seek to dupe you by hashing up the same old theme two or three times, but show my cleverness by introducing ever-new ideas, none alike and all smart.”
Socrates returns with Strepsiades, whom he can teach nothing. The Chorus suggest he should bring his son to learn from Socrates how to get rid of debts. At first Pheidippides refuses but finally agrees, though he warns his father that he will rue his act. The Just and Unjust arguments come out of the academy to plead before the Chorus. The former draws a picture of the old-fashioned times when a sturdy race of men was reared on discipline, obedience and morality–a broad-chested vigorous type. In utter contempt the latter brands such teaching as prehistoric. Pleasure, self-indulgence, a lax code of morality and easy tolerance of little weaknesses are the ideal. The power of his words is such that the Just Argument deserts to him.
Strepsiades, coached by his son, easily circumvents two money-lenders and retires to his house. He is soon chased out by his son, who when asked to sing the old songs of Simonides and Aeschylus scorned the idea, humming instead an immoral modern tune of Euripides’ making. A quarrel inevitably followed; Strepsiades was beaten by his son who easily proved that he had a right to beat his mother also. Stung to the quick the old man burns the academy; when Socrates and his pupils protest, he tells them they have but a just reward for their godlessness.
The Socrates here pilloried is certainly not the Socrates of history; his teaching was not immoral. But Aristophanes is drawing attention to the evil effects produced by the Sophists, who to the ordinary man certainly included Socrates. The importance of this play to us is clear. We are a nation of half-trained intelligences. Our national schools are frankly irreligious, our teachers people of weak credentials. Parental discipline is openly flouted, pleasure is our modern cult. Jazz bands, long-haired novelists and poets, misty philosophers, anti-national instructors are the idols of many a pale-faced and stunted son of Britain. The reverence which made us great is decadent and openly scoffed at. What is the remedy? Aristophanes burnt out the pestilent teachers. We had better not copy him till we are satisfied that the demand for them has ceased. A nation gets the instruction for which it is morally fitted. There is but one hope; we must follow the genuine Socratic method, which consisted of quiet individual instruction. Only thus will we slowly and patiently seize this modern spirit of unrest; our object should be not to suppress it–it is too sturdy, but to direct its energies to a better and a more noble end.
Finding that the _Clouds_ had been too wholesome to be popular, Aristophanes in 422 returned to attack Cleon in the _Wasps_. Early in the morning Bdelycleon (Cleon-hater) with his two servants is preventing his father Philocleon from leaving the house to go to the jury-courts. The old man’s amusing attempts to evade their vigilance are frustrated, whereupon he calls for assistance. Very slowly a body of old men dressed as wasps, led by boys carrying lanterns, finds its way to the house to act as Chorus. They make many suggestions to the father to escape; just as he is gnawing through the net over him his son rushes in. The wasps threaten him with their formidable stings. After a furious conflict truce is declared. Bdelycleon complains of the inveterate juryman’s habit of accusing everybody who opposes them of aiming at establishing a tyranny. Father and son consent to state their case for the Chorus to decide between them.
Philocleon glories in the absolute power he exercises over all classes; his rule is equal to that of a king. To him the greatest men in Athens bow as suppliants, begging acquittal. Some of these appeal to pity, others tell him Aesop’s fables, others try to make him laugh. Most of all, he controls foreign policy through his privilege of trying statesmen who fail. In return for his duties he receives his pay, goes home and is petted by his wife and family. Bdelycleon opens thus:
“it is a hard task, calling for a clever wit and more than comic genius to cure an ancient disease that has been breeding in the city.”
After giving a rough estimate of the total revenue of Athens, he subtracts from it the miserable sum of three obols which the jurymen receive as pay. Where does the remainder go? It is evident that the jurymen are the mere catspaw of the big unscrupulous politicians who get all the profit and incur none of the odium. This argument convinces both the Chorus and Philocleon, old heroes of Marathon who created the Empire.
The latter asks what he is to do. His son promises to look after him, allowing him to gratify at home his itch for trying disputes. Two dogs are brought in; by a trick the son makes his father acquit instead of condemn. He then dresses him up decently and instructs him in the etiquette of a dinner-party, whither they proceed. But the old man behaves himself disgracefully, beating everyone in his cups. He appears with a flute-girl and is summoned for assault by a vegetable-woman, whose goods he has spoiled, and by a professional accuser. His insolence to his victims is checked by his son who thrusts him into the house before more accusers can appear.
It is sometimes believed that democracy is a less corrupt form of polity than any other. Aristophanes in this play exposes one of its greatest weaknesses.
Flattered by the sense of power which the possession of the vote brings with it, the enfranchised classes cannot always see that they easily become the tools of the clever rogues who get themselves elected to office by playing on the fears of the electors. The Athenian voter was as easily scared by the word “tyranny” as the modern elector is by “capital”. The result is the same. Not only do the so-called lower orders sink into an ignorant slavery; they use their power so brainlessly and so mercilessly that they are a perfect bugbear to the rest.
Literary men’s prophecies rarely come true. In 421 the _Peace_, produced in March, was followed almost immediately by a compact between Athens and Sparta for fifty years. An old farmer, Trygaeus, sails up to heaven on the back of a huge beetle, bidding his family farewell for three days. He meets Hermes, who tells him that Zeus in disgust has surrendered men to the war they love. War himself has hidden Peace in a deep pit, and has made a great mortar in which he intends to grind civilisation to powder. He looks for the Athenian pestle, Cleon, but cannot find him–the Spartan pestle Brasidas has also been mislaid; both were lost in Thrace. Before he can find another pestle Trygaeus summons all men to pull Peace out of her prison. Hermes at first objects, but is won over by offers of presents. At length the goddess is discovered with her two handmaids, Harvest and Mayfair.
A change immediately comes over the faces of men. In pure joy they laugh through their bruises. Hermes explains to the farmers who form the Chorus why Peace left the earth. It was the trade rivalry which first drove her away; at Athens the subject cities fomented strife with Sparta, then the country population flocked to the city, where they fell easy victims to the public war-mongers, who found it profitable to continue the struggle. The god then offers to Trygaeus Harvest as a bride to make his vineyards fruitful. In the ode which follows the poet claims that he first made comedy dignified
“with great thoughts and words and refined jests, not lampooning individuals but attacking the Tanner war-god.”
Returning to earth Trygaeus sends Harvest to the Council, while the marriage sacrifice is made ready. A soothsayer endeavours to impose on the rustics with prophecies that the Peace will be a failure. Trygaeus refutes him with a quotation from Homer. “Without kin or law or home is a man who loveth harsh strife between peoples.” The makers of agricultural implements quickly sell all their stock, while the makers of helmets, crests and breastplates find their market gone. A glad wedding song forms the epilogue.
Aristophanes believed that the war meant an extinction of civilisation and loathed it because it was useless. What would he have thought of the barbarous and bloodthirsty Great War of our own day? The causes which produced both struggles were identical–trade rivalry and a set of jingoes who found that war paid. But he was mistaken in believing that peace was the normal condition of Greek life. He was born just before the great period began during which Pericles gave Greece a long respite from quarrels, and seems to have been quite nonplussed by what to him was an abnormal upheaval. His bright hopes soon faded and he seems to have given up thinking about peace or war during a period of eight years. In the meanwhile Athens had attacked Sicily; perhaps a change had come over comedy itself owing to legal action. At any rate, the old and virulent type of political abuse was becoming a thing of the past; the next play, the _Birds_, produced in 414, abandons Athens altogether for a new and charming world in which there was a rest from strife.
Two Athenians, Peithetairus (Persuasive) and Euelpides (Sanguine) reach the home of the Hoopoe bird, once a mortal, to find a happier place than their native city. Suddenly, as the bird describes the happy careless life of his kind, Peithetairus conceives the idea of founding a new bird city between earth and heaven. The Hoopoe summons his friends to hear their opinion; as they come in he names them to the wondering Athenians. At first the Birds threaten to attack the mortals, their natural enemies. They listen, however, to Peithetairus’ words of wisdom.
“Nay, wise men learn much from their foes, for good counsel saves everything. We cannot learn from a friend, but an enemy quickly forces the truth upon us. For example, cities learn from their enemies, not their friends, to create high walls and battleships, and such are the salvation of children, home and substance.”
A truce is made. Peithetairus tells them the Birds once ruled the world but have been deposed, becoming the prey of those who once worshipped them. They should ring round the air, like Babylon, with mighty baked bricks and send an ultimatum to the gods, demanding their lost kingdom and forbidding a passage to earth; another messenger should descend to men to require from them due sacrifices. The Birds agree; the two companions retire to Hoopoe’s house to eat the magic root which will turn them into winged things. After a choral panegyric on the bird species Peithetairus returns to name the new city Cloudcuckootown, whose erection is taken in hand. Impostors make their appearance, a priest to sacrifice, a poet to eulogise, an oracle-dealer to promise success, a mathematician to plan out the buildings, an overseer and a seller of decrees to enact by-laws; all are summarily ejected by Peithetairus.
News comes that the city is already completed. Suddenly Iris darts in, on her way to earth to demand the accustomed sacrifices from men which the new city has interrupted; she is sent back to heaven to warn the gods of their coming overthrow. A herald from earth brings tidings that more than a myriad human beings are on their way to settle in the city. A parent-beater first appears, then a poet, then an informer –all being firmly dealt with. Prometheus slips in under a parasol, to advise Peithetairus to demand from Zeus his sceptre and with it the lady Royalty as his bride. Poseidon, Heracles and an outlandish Triballian god after a long discussion make terms with the new monarch, who goes with them to fetch his bride. A triumphant wedding forms the conclusion.
The purpose of this comedy has been the subject of much discussion. As a piece of literature it is exquisite. It lifts us out of a world of hard unpleasant fact into a region where life is a care-free thing, bores or impostors are banished and the reign of the usurper ends. The play is not of or for any one particular period; it is really timeless, appealing to the ineradicable desire we all have for an existence of joy and light, where dreams always come true and hope ends only in fulfilment. It is therefore one of man’s deathless achievements; the power of its appeal is evident from the frequency with which it has been revived–it was staged at Cambridge this very year. Staged it will be as long as men are what they are.
Having learned that men are a naturally combative race, lusting for blood, the poet saw it was hopeless to bring them to terms. Nor could he for ever live in Cloudcuckootowns; he therefore bethought him of another expedient for obtaining peace. In 411 he imagines the women of Athens, Peloponnese and Boeotia combining to force terms on the men by deserting their homes, under the leadership of _Lysistrata_. She calls a council of war, explaining her plot to capture the Acropolis. A Chorus of men rush in to smoke them out, armed with firebrands, but are met by a Chorus of women bearing pitchers to quench the flames. An officer of the Council comes to argue with Lysistrata, who points out that in the first part of the war (down to 421) the women had kept quiet, though aware of men’s incompetence; now they have determined to control matters. They are possessed of the Treasury, their experience of household economy gives them a good claim to organise State finance; they grow old in the absence of their husbands; a man can marry a girl however old he is. A woman’s prime soon comes; if she misses it, she sits at home looking for omens of a husband; women make the most valuable of all contributions to the State, namely sons. The officer retires to report to the Council.
Lysistrata, seeing a weakness in the women’s resolution, encourages them with an oracle which promises victory if they will only persist. A herald speedily arrives from Sparta announcing a similar defection in that city. Ambassadors of both sides are brought to Lysistrata who makes a splendid speech.
“I am a woman, but wit is in me and I have no small conceit of myself. Having heard many speeches from my father and elder men I am not ill-informed. Now that I have caught you I will administer to you the rebuke you richly deserve. You sprinkle altars from the same lustral-bowl, like relatives, at Olympia, Pylae, Delphi and many other places. Though the barbarian enemy is on you in armed force, you destroy Greek men and cities.”
She points out that both sides have been guilty of injustice; both should make surrenders and agree to a peace which is duly ratified. The Chorus of men believe that Athenian ambassadors should go to Sparta in their cups:–
“As it is, whenever we go there sober, we immediately see what mischief we can make. We never hear what they say; what they do not say we conjecture and never bring back the same tale about the same facts.”
Odes of thanksgiving wind up the piece.
Exactly twenty years earlier Euripides in the _Medea_ had written the first protest against women’s subjection to an unfair social lot. By a strange irony of fortune his most severe critic Aristophanes was the first man in Europe to give utterance to their claim to a political equality. True, he does so in a comedy, but he was speaking perhaps more seriously than he would have us think. Women do contribute sons to the State; they do believe that they are as capable as men of judging political questions–with justice, in a system where no qualifications but twilight opinions are necessary. On this ground they have won the franchise. Nor has the feminist movement really begun as yet. We may see women in control of our political Acropolis, forcing the world to make peace to save our chances of becoming ultimately civilised.
The _Thesmophoriazousae_, staged in 411, is a lampoon on Euripides. That poet with his kinsman Mnesilochus calls at the house of Agathon, a brother tragedian whose style is amusingly parodied. Euripides informs him that the women intend to hold a meeting to destroy him for libel; they are celebrating the feast of the Thesmophoria. As Agathon refuses an invitation to go disguised and defend Euripides, Mnesilochus undertakes the dangerous duty; his disguise is effected on the stage with comic gusto. At the meeting the case against the poet is first stated; he has not only lampooned women, he has taught their husbands how to counter their knaveries and is an atheist. Mnesilochus defends him; women are capable of far more villainies than even Euripides has exposed. The statement of these raises the suspicions of the ladies who soon unmask the intruder, inquiring of him the secret ritual of the Thesmophoria.
One of them goes to the Town Council to find out what punishment they are to inflict.
Mnesilochus meanwhile snatches a child from the arms of one of them, holding it as a hostage. To his amazement it turns out to be a wine-stoup. He vainly tries some of the dodges practised in Euripides’ plays to bring him to the rescue. The Chorus meantime expose the folly of calling women evil.
“If we are a bane, why do you marry us? Why do you forbid us to walk abroad or to be caught peeping out? Why use such pains to preserve this evil thing? If we do peep out, everybody wants this bane to be seen; if we draw back in modesty, every man is much more anxious to see this pest peep out again. At any rate, no woman comes into the city after stealing public money fifty talents at a time.”
A better plan would be
“to give the mothers of famous sons the right of place in festivals; those whose sons are evil should take a lower place.”
In an amusing series of scenes Euripides enters dressed up as some of his own characters to save Mnesilochus. A borough officer enters with a policeman whom he orders to bind the prisoner and guard him. More disguises are adopted by Euripides who succeeds at last in freeing his kinsman by pretending to be an old woman with a marriageable daughter whom the policeman can have at a price. When the latter goes to fetch the money Euripides and his relative disappear.
The poet has in this play very skilfully palmed off on Euripides his own attack on women. We have already seen what Euripides’ attitude was to the neglected sex. Feminine deceit has been a stock theme in all ages; it had already been treated in Greek literature and was to be passed through Roman literature to the Middle Ages, in which period it received more than its due share of attention. In itself it is a poor theme, good enough perhaps as a stand-by, for it is sure to be popular. Those who pose as woman-haters might consider the words of the Chorus in this play.
The most violent attack on Euripides was delivered after his death by Aristophanes in the _Frogs_, written in 405. This famous comedy is so well-known that a brief outline will suffice. It falls into two parts. The first describes the adventures of Dionysus who with his servant Xanthias descends to the lower world to bring back Euripides. The god and his servant exchange parts according as the persons they meet are friendly or hostile. In the second part the three great tragedians are brought on the scene. Euripides, who has just died, tries to claim sovereignty in Hades; Sophocles, “gentle on earth and gentle in death” withdraws his claim, leaving Aeschylus to the contest. The two rivals appoint Dionysus, the patron of drama, to act as umpire. In a series of admirable criticisms the weaknesses of both are plainly indicated. Finally Dionysus decides to take back Aeschylus.
This play is as popular as the Birds. It contains one or two touches of low comedy, but these are redeemed by the spirit of inexhaustible jollity which sets the whole thing rocking with life and gaiety. It is an original in Greek literature, being the first piece of definitely literary criticism. A long experience had made the sense of the stage a second nature to Aristophanes who here criticises two rival schools of poetry as a dramatist possessed of inside professional knowledge. So far his work is of the same class as Cicero’s _De Oratore_ and Reynolds’ _Discourses_. His object, however, was not to preserve a balance of impartiality but to condemn Euripides as a traitor to the whole tradition of Attic tragedy. He does so, but not without giving his reasons–and these are good and true. No person is qualified to judge the development of Greek tragedy who has not weighed long and carefully the second portion of the _Frogs_.
In 393 Aristophanes broke entirely new ground in the _Ecclesiazousae_ (women in Parliament), a discussion of social and economic problems. Praxagora assembles the women of Athens to gain control of the city. They meet early in the morning, disguise themselves with beards and open the question.
“The decisions of men in Parliament are to reflecting people like the derangements of drunken men. I am disgusted with our policy, we always employ unscrupulous leaders. If one of them is honest for one day, he is a villain for ten. Doling out public money, men have eyes only for what they can make out of the State. Let women govern; they are the best at providing money and are not likely to be deceived in office, for they are well versed in trickery.”
They proceed to the Assembly to execute their plot.
On the opening of the discussion one Euaeon proposed a scheme of wholesale spoliation of the property owners to support the poor. Then a white-faced citizen arose and proposed flatly that women should rule, that being the one thing which had never yet been tried. The motion was carried with great enthusiasm, the men declaring that “an old proverb says all our senseless and foolish decisions turn out for good”. When Praxagora returns to the stage, she declares she intends to introduce a system of absolute communism. All citizens are to live and dine in common and possess wives in common, existing on the work of slaves. Any person who refuses to declare his wealth is to be punished by losing his rations, “the punishment of a man through his belly being the worst insult he can suffer”. A vivid description of the workings of the new system ends the play.
Aristophanes is no doubt criticising Plato’s _Republic_, but allowing for altered circumstances we cannot go far wrong if we see here a picture of the suggested remedy for the social distress which is inseparable from a great war. At Athens, beaten and impoverished, there must have been widespread discontent; the foundation upon which society was built must have been criticised, its inequalities being emphasised by idealists and intriguers alike. Our own generation has to face a similar situation. We have seen women in Parliament and we are deluged by a flood of communistic idealism emanating from Russia. Its one commendation is that it has never yet been tried among us and many simple folk will applaud the philosophy which persuades itself that all our mistakes will somehow come right in the end. The problem of finding somebody to do the work was easily solved in ancient Athens where the slaves were three times as numerous as the free. England, possessing no slaves, would under communism be unable to feed herself and would die of starvation.
The _Plutus_, written in 388 is a singular work. An honest old man Chremylus enters with Carion “his most faithful and most thievish servant”. They are holding fast a blind old man, in obedience to an oracle of Apollo. After a little questioning the stranger admits that he is Plutus, the god of wealth. Wild with joy they invite him to their house. He does not like houses, for they have never brought him to any good.
“If I enter a stingy man’s abode, he immediately digs me deep in the earth and denies he has ever seen me. If I enter a crazy man’s home, given to dicing and fast living, I am soon ejected naked.”
Learning that Chremylus is honest and poor he consents to try once again.
The rumour gets abroad that Chremylus has suddenly grown rich; his acquaintance reveal their true characters as they come to question him about his luck. The goddess Poverty enters, to be cross-examined by Chremylus who has suggested that Plutus should recover his sight under the healing care of Asclepius. Before the care is effected, she points out the dangers of his project. He is well-meaning, but foolish; Poverty is not Mendicancy, it means a life of thrift, with nothing left over but with no real want; it is the source of the existence of all the handicrafts, nor can the slaves be counted on to do the work if everybody becomes rich, for nobody will sell slaves if he has money already. Riches on the other hand are the curse of many; wealth rots men, causing gout, dropsy and bloated insolence; the gods themselves are poor, otherwise they would not need human sacrifice.
The cure is successful; Plutus recovers his eyes and can see to whom he gives his blessings; the good and the rascals alike receive their due reward. The change which wealth produces in men’s natures is most admirably depicted in the Epilogue.
This is an Allegory dramatised with no little skill. The piece is full of the shrewdest hits at our human failings, aimed, however, with no ill-nature. Aristophanes’ power of characterisation here shows no falling-off. Fortune’s fickleness is proverbial and has received frequent literary treatment. Men’s first prayer is for wealth; poverty, according to Dr. Johnson, is evidently a great evil because it needs such a long defence. Yet it is only the well-meaning but utterly unpractical idealists who desire to make us all prosperous–
“How that may change our nature, that’s the question.”
Some are not fit for riches, being ignorant of their true function; self-indulgence and moral rottenness follow wealth; because of the abuse of the power which wealth brings, we are taught that it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.
It is difficult to convey an adequate impression of Aristophanes to the English reader. Long excerpts are impossible and undesirable. Comedy is essentially a mirror of contemporary life; it contains all kinds of references to passing political events and transient forms of social life; its turns of language are peculiar to its own age. We who are familiar with Shakespeare know that one of our chief difficulties in reading him is the constant reference to what was obvious to the Elizabethan public but is dark to us. Yet the plays of Aristophanes in an English translation such as that of Frere read far more like modern work than the comedies of Ben Jonson, for the society in which Aristophanes moved was far more akin to ours. It was democratic, was superficially educated, was troubled by socialistic and communistic unrest exactly as we are. Some of our modern thinkers would be surprised to find how many of their dreamings were discussed twenty-three centuries ago by men quite as intelligent and certainly as honest.
Aristophanes’ greatest fault is excessive conservatism. He gives us a most vivid description of the evils and abuses of his own time, yet has no remedy except that of putting back the hands of the clock some fifty years. Marathon, Aeschylus, the nascent democracy were his ideal and he was evidently put out by the ending of the period of “Periclean calm.” He then has no solution for the problems in front of him. But it might be asked whether a dramatist’s business is not rather to leave solutions to the thinker, concerning himself only with mirroring men’s natures. With singular courage and at no small personal risk this man attacked the great ones of his day, scourging their hypocrisies and exposing the real tendencies of their principles. If he has opened our eyes to the objections to popular government and popular poetry and has made us aware of the significance of the feminist movement, let us be thankful; we shall be more on our guard and be less easily persuaded that problems are new or that they are capable of a final solution.
On the other hand, we shall find in him qualities of a most original type. His spirits are inexhaustible, he laughs heartily and often without malice at the follies of the mass of men; Cleon and Euripides were anathema to him, but the rest he treats as Fluellen did Pistol: “You beggarly knave, God bless you”. His lyrics must be classed with the best in Greek poetry. Like Rabelais this rollicking jolly spirit disguises his wisdom under the mask of folly, turning aside with some whimsical twist just when he is beginning to be too serious. He will repay the most careful reading, for his best things are constantly turning up when least expected. His political satire ceasing with the death of Cleon, he turned to the land of pure fancy among the winged careless things; he then raised the woman’s question, started literary criticism and ended with Allegory. To few has such a noble cycle of work been vouchsafed; we owe him at least a debt of remembrance, for he loved us as our brother.
TRANSLATIONS:
Frere (verse). This spirited version of five plays is justly famous. Various plays have been rendered into verse by Rogers (Bell). The translation is on the whole rather free. The volumes contain excellent introductions and notes.
No prose translation of outstanding merit has appeared.
The Greek tragedians have not received their due from translators and admirers. There is nothing in English drama inspired by Greece to compare with the French imitations of Seneca, Plautus and Terence.
HERODOTUS
Greek historical literature follows the same course of development as Greek poetry; it begins in epic form in Ionia and ends in dramatic type at Athens.
Herodotus, “the father of History”, was born at Halicarnassus in Asia Minor about 484 B.C. He travelled widely over the East, Egypt, North Africa and Greece. He was acquainted with the Sophoclean circle, joined the Athenian colony at Thurii in South Italy and died there before the end of the century. His subject was the defeat of the Persian attack on Greece and falls into three main divisions. In the first three books he tells how Persian power was consolidated: in the next three he shows how it flooded Russia, Thrace and Greece, being stemmed at Marathon in 490; the last three contain the story of its final shattering at Salamis and Plataea in 480 and of the Greek recoil on Asia in 479. It is thus a “triple wave of woes” familiar to Greek thought. His dialect is Ionic, which he adopted because it was the language of narrative poetry and prose.
His introduction leads at once into Romance; he intends to preserve the memory of the wonderful deeds of Greeks and Barbarians, the cause of their quarrel being the abductions of women, Io, Europe, Medea, Helen. A more recent aggressor was Croesus, King of Lydia, who attacked the Greek seaboard. The earlier reigns of Lydian kings are recounted in a series of striking narratives. Gyges was the owner of the famous magic ring which made its possessor invisible. His policy of expansion was continued by his son and grandson. But Croesus, his great-grandson, was the wealthiest of all, extending his realm from as far as the Halys, the boundary of Cyrus’ Persian Empire. Solon’s famous but fictitious warning to him to “wait till the end comes before deciding whether he had been happy” left him unmoved. Soon clouds began to gather. A pathetic misadventure robbed him of his son; the growing power of Persia alarmed him and he applied to Delphi for advice. The oracle informed him that if he crossed the Halys he would ruin a mighty Empire and suggested alliance with the strongest state in Greece. Finding that Athens was still torn by political struggles consequent upon the romantic banishments and restorations of Peisistratus, he joined with Sparta which had just overcome a powerful rival, Tegea in Arcadia.
Croesus crossed the Halys in 554. After fighting an indecisive battle he retired to his capital Sardis. Cyrus unexpectedly pursued him. The Lydian cavalry stampeded, the horses being terrified by the sight and odour of the Persian camel corps. Croesus shut himself up in Sardis which he thought impregnable. An excellent story tells how the Persians scaled the most inaccessible part of the fortress. Croesus was put on a pyre and there remembered the words of Solon. Cyrus, dreading a similar revolution of fortune, tried in vain to save him from the burning faggots; the fire was too fierce for his men to quench, but Apollo heard Croesus’ prayer and sent a rainstorm which saved him. Being reproached by the fallen monarch who had poured treasure into his temple, Apollo replied that he had staved off ruin for three full years, but could not prevail against Fate; besides, Croesus should have asked whose Empire he was to destroy; at least Apollo had delivered him from death. The Lydian portion ends with a graphic description of laws, customs and monuments.
The rise of Persia is next described. Assyria, whose capital was Nineveh, was destroyed by Cyaxares of Media, whose capital was Ecbatana. His son Astyages in consequence of a dream married his daughter Mandane to a Persian named Cambyses. A second dream made him resolve to destroy her child Cyrus who, like Oedipus, was saved from exposure by a herdsman. Later, on learning Cyrus’ identity, Astyages punished Harpagus whom he had bidden to remove the child. Harpagus sowed mutiny in the Median army, giving the victory to the Persians in 558. Cyrus proceeded to attack the Asiatic Greeks, of whom the Phocaeans left their home to found new states in Corsica and Southern Gaul; the other cities surrendered. Babylon was soon the only city in Asia not subject to Persia. Cyrus diverted the course of the Euphrates and entered the town in 538. In an attack on Tomyris, queen of a Scythian race, Cyrus was defeated and slain in 529.
His son Cambyses determined to invade Egypt, the eternal rival of the Mesopotamian kings. Herodotus devotes his second book to a description of the marvels of Egypt, through which he travelled as far as Elephantine on the border of Ethiopia. He opens with a plain proof that Egypt is not the most ancient people, for some children were kept apart during their first two years, nobody being allowed to speak with them. They were then heard to say distinctly the word “bekos” which was Phrygian for “bread”. This evidence of Phrygian antiquity satisfied even the Egyptians.
In this second book there is hardly a single leading feature of Egyptian civilisation which is not discussed. The Nile is the life of the land; being anxious to solve the riddle of its annual rise, Herodotus dismisses as unreasonable the theory that the water is produced by the melting snow, for the earth becomes hotter as we proceed further south, and there cannot be snow where there is intense heat. The sun is deflected from its course in winter, which derangement causes the river to run shallow in that season. The religious practice of the land are well described, including the process of embalming; oracles, animals, medicine, writing, dress are all treated. He notes that in Egyptian records the sun has twice risen in the west and twice set in the east.
A long list of dynasties is relieved with many an excellent story, notably the very famous account of how Rhampsonitis lost his treasures and failed to find the robber until he offered him a free pardon; having found him he said the Egyptians excelled all the world in wisdom, and the robber all the Egyptians. The Pyramids are described; transmigration is discussed and emphasis is laid upon the growing popularity of Greek mercenaries. The book closes with the brilliant reign of Amasis, who made overtures to the Greek oracles, allied himself with Samos and permitted the foundation of an important Greek colony at Naucratis.
The third book opens with the invasion of Egypt by Cambyses in 525 on account of an insult offered him by Amasis. A Greek mercenary named Phanes gave the Persians information of the one means of attacking through the desert. After a fierce battle at Pelusium Egypt was beaten; for years afterwards skulls of both armies lay around, the Persian heads being easily broken by a pebble, the Egyptian scarcely breakable by stones. In victory Cambyses outraged Psammenitus, the defeated King; a fruitless expedition against Ethiopia and the Ammonians followed. The Egyptians were stirred by the arrival of their calf-god Apis; Cambyses mockingly wounded him and was punished with madness, slaying his own kindred and committing deeds of impiety.
At that time Egypt was leagued with the powerful island of Samos, ruled by Polycrates, a tyrant of marvellous good fortune. Suspecting some coming disaster to balance it, Amasis urged him to sacrifice his dearest possession to avert the evil eye. Polycrates threw his ring into the sea; it was retrieved by a fisherman. On hearing this, Amasis severed his alliance.
In the absence of Cambyses two Magi brothers stirred up revolt in Susa, one pretending to be Smerdis, the murdered brother of Cambyses. That monarch wounded himself in the thigh as he mounted his horse. The wound festered and caused speedy death. Meanwhile the false Smerdis held the sovereignty. He was suspected by Otanes, a noble whose daughter Phaedyme was married to him. At great personal risk she discovered that the King was without ears, a manifest proof that he was a Magian. Otane thens joined with six other conspirators to put the usurper down. Darius, son of Hystaspes, warned them that their numbers were too large for secrecy, advising immediate action. The two pretenders had meanwhile persuaded Prexaspes, a confidant of Cambyses, to assure the Persians that Smerdis really ruled. Prexaspes told the truth and then threw himself to death from the city walls. This news forced the conspirators’ hands; rushing into the palace, they were luckily able to slay the usurpers.
The next question was, who should reign? Herodotus turned these Persians into Greeks, making them discuss the comparative merits of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. They decided that their horses should choose the next king; he whose steed should first neigh should rule. Darius had a cunning groom named Oebares; that evening he took the horse and his mare into the market-place; next morning on reaching the same spot the horse did not fail to seat his master on the throne in 521. A review of the Persian Empire follows, with a description of India and Arabia.
Polycrates did not long survive. He was the first Greek to conceive the idea of a maritime empire. He was foully murdered by the Persian Oroetes, who decoyed him to the mainland by an offer of treasure and then crucified him. In the retinue of Polycrates was a physician, Democedes of Croton, who was captured by Oroetes. His fame spread to Susa at a time when no court doctor could treat Darius’ sprained foot. Democedes was sent for and effected the cure; later he healed the Queen Atossa of a boil. Instructed by him she advised Darius to send a commission of fifteen Persians to spy out the Greek mainland under Democedes’ guidance. After an exciting series of adventures the physician succeeded in returning to his native city. But the idea of an invasion of Greece had settled on Darius’ mind. First, however, he took Samos, giving it to Syloson, Polycrates’ brother who years before in Egypt had made him a present of a scarlet cloak while he was a mere guardsman. Darius consolidated his power in Asia by the capture of the revolted province of Babylon through the self-sacrifice of Zopyrus, son of one of the seven conspirators. The vivid story of his devotion is one of the very greatest things in Herodotus.
Persia being thus mistress of all Asia, of Samos and the seaboard, began to dream of subduing Greece itself. But first Darius determined to conquer his non-Greek neighbours. The fourth book describes the attack which Darius himself led against the Scythians in revenge for the twenty-eight years’ slavery they inflicted on the Medes. A description of Scythia is relieved by an account of the circumnavigation of Africa by the Phoenicians and the voyage of Scylax down the Indus and along the coast of Africa to Egypt.
The war on the Scyths was dramatic and exciting, both sides acting in the spirit of chivalry. Crossing the Bosporus, Darius advanced through Thrace to the Danube which he spanned with a bridge. The Scyths adopted the favourite Russian plan of retreating into the interior, destroying the crops and hovering round the foe; they further led the Persians into the territories of their own enemies. This process at last wearied Darius; he sent a herald to challenge them to a straight contest or to become his vassals. The reply came that if Darius wished a conflict he had better outrage their ancestral tombs; as for slavery, they acknowledged only Zeus as their master. But the threat of slavery did its work. A detachment was sent to the Danube to induce the Ionian Greeks to strike for freedom by breaking down the bridge they were guarding, thus cutting off Darius’ retreat. To the King himself a Scythian herald brought a present of a bird, a mouse, a frog and five arrows, implying that unless his army became one of the creatures it would perish by the arrows. The Scyths adopted guerilla tactics, leaving the Persians no rest by night and offering no battle by day. At last Darius began his retreat. One division of the Scythian horsemen reached the bridge before their foes, again asking the Ionians to destroy it. The Greeks pretended to consent, breaking down the Scythian end of it. Darius at last came to the place; to his dismay he found the bridge demolished. He bade an Egyptian Stentor summon Histiaeus, the Greek commandant, who brought up the fleet and saved the Persian host which retired into Asia.
In 509 a second expedition was dispatched against Barca, a colony of Cyrene. The history of the latter is graphically described, the first king being Battus, the Stammerer, who founded it in obedience to the directions of Apollo. Cyrene was brought under Cambyses’ sway by Arcesilaus who had been banished. He misinterpreted an oracle and cruelly killed his enemies in Barca. When he was assassinated in that town his mother Pheretima fled from the metropolis Cyrene to Aryandes, the Persian governor in Egypt. Backed by armed force she besieged Barca which resisted bravely for nine months; at the end of that term an agreement was made that Barca should pay tribute and remain unassailed as long as the ground remained firm on which the treaty was made. But the Persians had undermined the spot, covering planks of wood with a loose layer of earth. Breaking down the planks they rushed in and took the town, Pheretima exacting a horrible vengeance. Yet she herself died soon after, eaten of worms. “Thus,” remarks the historian, “do men, by too severe vengeances, draw upon their own heads the divine wrath.”
The fifth book begins the concentration on purely Greek history. Darius had left Megabazus in command in Europe, retiring himself to Sardis. In that city he was much struck by the appearance of a Paeonian woman and ordered Megabazus to invade the country. He subdued it and Macedonia in 506-4, but in the process some of his commanders were punished for an insult to Macedonian women, revenge being taken by Alexander, son of King Amyntas; a bride shut the lips of a party sent to discover their fate. In Thrace, Megabazus began to suspect Histiaeus, the Ionian who had saved Darius and in return had been given a strong town, Myrcinus on the River Strymon. The King by a trick drew Histiaeus to Sardis and took him to the Capital, leaving his brother Artaphernes as governor in Sardis. But Histiaeus had been succeeded in Miletus by his nephew Aristagoras; to him in 502 came certain nobles from Naxos, one of the Cyclades isles, begging restoration from banishment. He decided to apply to Artaphernes for Persian help; this the viceroy willingly gave as it would further the Persian progress to the objective, the Greek mainland, across the Aegean in a direct line. The Persian admiral Megabates soon quarrelled with Aristagoras about the command and informed the Naxians of the coming attack. The expedition thus failed. Aristagoras, afraid to face Artaphemes whose treasure he had wasted, decided on raising a revolt of the whole of Ionia; at that very moment a slave came to him from his uncle in Susa with a message tattooed on his head, bidding him rebel.
Aristagoras first applied to Sparta for aid. When arguments failed, he tried to bribe the king Cleomenes. In the room was the King’s little daughter Gorgo. Hearing Aristagoras gradually raise his offer from ten to fifty talents, the child said, “Father, depart, or the stranger will corrupt thee”. Aristagoras received a better welcome at Athens. That city in 510 had expelled Hippias, the tyrant son of Peisistratus, who appealed to Artaphernes for aid. Hearing this, the Athenians sent an embassy asking the satrap not to assist the exile, but the answer was that if they wished to survive, they must receive their ruler back. Aristagoras therefore found the Athenians in a fit frame of mind to listen. They lent him a fleet of twenty sail and marched with him to Sardis which they captured and burned in 501. The revolt speedily spread over all the Asiatic sea-coast. On hearing of the Athenians for the first time, Darius directed a slave to say to him thrice a day, “Sire, remember the Athenians”. He summoned Histiaeus and accused him of complicity in the revolt, but Histiaeus assured him of his loyalty and obtained permission to go to the coast. Meanwhile the Persians took strong action against the rebels, subduing many towns and districts. The book ends with the flight of Aristagoras to Myrcinus and his death in battle against the Thracians in 496.
The next book opens with the famous accusation of Histiaeus by Artaphernes: “Thou hast stitched this boot and Aristagoras hath put it on.” Histiaeus in fear fled to his own city Miletus; being disowned there, he for a time maintained a life of privateering, but was eventually captured and crucified by Artaphernes. The Ionian revolt had been narrowed down to Miletus and one or two less important towns. The Greeks assembled a fleet, but a spirit of insubordination manifesting itself they were defeated at sea in the battle of Lade in 495. Next year Miletus fell but was treated with mercy. At Athens the news caused the greatest consternation; a dramatic poet named Phrynichus ventured to stage the disaster; the people wept and fined him a thousand talents, forbidding any similar presentation in future. Stamping out the last embers of revolt in Asia the Persians coasted along Thrace; before their advance the great Athenian Miltiades was compelled to fly from the Dardanelles to his native city. In 492 Mardonius was appointed viceroy of Asia Minor. He reorganised the provincial system and then attempted to double the perilous promontory of Athos, but only a remnant of his forces returned to Asia.
Next year Darius sent to all the Greek cities demanding earth and water, the tokens of submission. The islanders obeyed including Aegina, the deadly foe of Athens. A protest made by the latter led to a war between the two states in which Athens was worsted. Sparta itself had just been torn by an internal dissension between two claimants of the throne, one of whom named Demaratus had been ejected and later fled to the Persian court. The great expedition of 490 sailed straight across the Aegean, commanded by Datis and Artaphernes. Their primary objective was Eretria in Euboea, a city which had assisted the Ionians in their revolt. The town was speedily betrayed, the inhabitants being carried aboard the Persian fleet. Guided by Hippias the armament landed at the bay of Marathon, twenty-five miles from Athens. A vain appeal was sent to Sparta for succours; Athens, supported by the little Boeotian city of Plataea, was left to cope with the might of Persia.
It was fortunate that the Athenians could command the services of Miltiades who had already had some experience of the Persian methods of attack. The details of the great battle that followed depend upon the sole authority of Herodotus among the Greek writers. Many difficulties are caused by his narrative, but it seems certain that Miltiades was in command on the day on which the battle was actually fought. He apparently clung to the hills overlooking the plain and bay of Marathon until the Persian cavalry were unable to act. Seizing the opportunity, he led his men down swiftly to the combat; his centre which had been purposely weakened was thrust back but the two wings speedily proved victorious, then converged to assist the centre, finally driving the foe to the sea where a desperate conflict took place. The Persians succeeded in embarking and promptly sailed round the coast to Athens, but seeing the victors in arms before the town they sailed back to Asia. The Spartan reinforcements which arrived too late for the battle viewed the Persian dead and returned after praising the Athenians.
A slight digression tells the amusing story how the Athenian Hippocleides in his cups lost the hand of the princess of Sicyon because he danced on his head and waved his legs about, shouting that he didn’t care. The great victor Miltiades did not long survive his glory. His attempt to reduce the island of Paros, which had sided with Persia, completely failed. Returning to Athens he was condemned and fined, shortly after dying of a mortified thigh.
In the third portion Herodotus gradually rises to his greatest height of descriptive power. Darius resolved on a larger expedition to reduce Greece. He made preparations for three years, then a revolt in Egypt delayed his plans and his career was cut short by death in 485. His successor Xerxes was disinclined to invade Europe, but was overborne by Mardonius his cousin. A canal was dug across the peninsula of Athos, a bridge was built over the Hellespont, and provisions were collected. A detailed account of the component forces is given, special mention being made of Artemisia, Queen of Herodotus’ own city, who was to win great glory in the campaign. The army marched over the Hellespont and along the coast, the fleet supporting it; advancing through Thessaly, it reached the pass of Thermopylae, opposite Euboea, in 480.
On the Greek side was division; the Spartans imagined that their duty was to save the Peloponnese only; they were eager to build a wall across the isthmus of Corinth, leaving the rest of Greece to its fate. But Athens had produced another genius named Themistocles. Shortly before the invasion the silver mines at Laureium in Attica had yielded a surplus; he persuaded the city to use it for building a fleet of two hundred sail to be directed against Aegina. When the Athenians got an oracle from Delphi which stated that they would lose their land but be saved by their wooden walls, he interpreted the oracle as referring to the fleet. Under his management the city built more ships. The Council of Greece held at the Isthmus of Corinth decided that an army should defend Thermopylae while the fleet supported it close by at Artemisium. The Persian fleet had been badly battered in a storm as it sailed along the coast of Magnesia, nearly four hundred sail foundering; the remainder reached safe anchorage in the Malian gulf, further progress being impossible till the Greek navy was beaten or retired.
At Thermopylae the advance-guard was composed of Spartans led by Leonidas who determined to defend the narrow pass. A Persian spy brought the news to Xerxes that this small body of warriors were combing their hair. The King sent for Demaratus, the ex-Spartan monarch, who assured him that this was proof that the Spartans intended to fight to the death. After a delay of four days the fight began. The Spartans routed all their opponents including the famous Immortals, the Persian bodyguard. At length a traitor Ephialtes told Xerxes of a path across the mountains by which Leonidas could be taken in the rear. Learning from deserters and fugitives that he had been betrayed, Leonidas dismissed the main body, himself advancing into the open. After winning immortal glory he and his men were destroyed and the way to Greece lay open to the invader.
In three naval engagements off Artemisium the Greek fleet showed its superiority; a detachment of two hundred sail had been sent round the island of Euboea to block up the exit of the channel through which the Greek navy had to retreat, but a storm totally destroyed this force. When the army retreated from Thermopylae the Greek ships were obliged to retire to the Isthmus; in spite of much opposition the Athenians compelled Eurybiades the Spartan admiral to take up his station at Salamis, whither the Persian navy followed. Their army had advanced through Boeotia, attacking Delphi on the way. The story was told how Apollo himself defended his shrine, hurling down rocks on the invaders and sending supernatural figures to discomfit them. Entering Attica the barbarian host captured a deserted Athens, Xerxes sending the glad news to his subjects in the Persian capital.
The Greeks were with difficulty persuaded not to abandon the sea altogether. Themistocles was bitterly opposed in his naval policy by Adeimantus, the Corinthian; it was only by threatening to leave Greece with their fleet that the Athenians were able to bring the allies to reason. By a stroke of cunning Themistocles forced their hands; a messenger went to Xerxes with news of the Greek intention to retreat; on hearing this the Persians during the night blocked up the passages round Salamis and landed some of their best troops on a little island called Psyttaleia. The news of this encircling movement was brought to the allies by Aristides, a celebrated Athenian who was in exile, and was confirmed by a Tenian ship which deserted from the Persians. Next morning the Greeks sailed down the strait to escape the blockade and soon the famous battle began. Among the brave deeds singled out for special mention none was bolder than that of Artemisia who sank a friend to escape capture. The remainder of the Persian captains had no chance of resisting, being huddled up in a narrow channel. Seeing Artemisia’s courage Xerxes remarked that his men had become women, his women men. The rout of the invaders was quickly completed, the chief glory being won by Aegina and Athens; the victory was consummated by the slaughter of the troops on Psyttaleia. The Persian monarch sent tidings of this defeat to his capital and in terror of a revolt in Ionia decided to retreat, leaving Mardonius in command of picked troops. He hurriedly passed along the way he had come, almost disappearing from Herodotus’ story.
Mardonius accompanied him to Thessaly and Macedonia; he sent Alexander, King of the latter country, as an envoy to Athens, offering to rebuild the temples and restore all property in exchange for an alliance. Hearing the news the Spartans in fear for themselves sent a counter-embassy. The Athenian reply is one of the great things in historical literature. “It was a base surmise in men like the Spartans who know our mettle. Not all the gold in the world would tempt us to enslave our own countrymen. We have a common brotherhood with all Greeks, a common language, common altars and sacrifices, common nationality; it would be unseemly to betray these. We thank you for your offer to support our ruined families, but we will bear our calamities as we may and will not burden you. Lead out your troops; face the enemy in Boeotia and there give him battle.”
The last book relates the consequences of the Athenian reply to Alexander. Mardonius advanced rapidly to Athens, which he captured a second time. The Spartans were busy keeping the feast of Hyacinthia; only an Athenian threat to come to terms with the foe prevailed on them to move. Mardonius soon evacuated Attica, the ground being too stony for cavalry, and encamped near Plataea. The Greeks followed, taking the high ground on Mount Cithaeron. A brave exploit of the Athenian infantry in defeating cavalry heartened the whole army. After eleven days’ inaction, Mardonius determined to attack, news of his plan being brought secretly at night to the Athenians by Alexander. The Spartans, afraid of facing the Persians, exchanged places with the Athenians; when this movement was discovered by Mardonius, he sent a challenge to the Spartans to decide the battle by a single conflict between them and his Persian division. Receiving no reply, he let his cavalry loose on the Greeks who began to retire to a place called the Island, where horse could not operate. This action took place during the night. When morning broke the battle began. The Persian wicker shields could not resist their enemies’ weapons; the host fled and after Mardonius fell was slaughtered in heaps. The Greek took vengeance on the Thebans who had acted with the Persians, of whom a mere remnant reached Asia under the command of Artabazus.
The victorious Greek fleet had advanced as far as Delos, commanded by Leotychides, a Spartan of royal blood. To them came an embassy from Samos, urging an attack on the Persians encamped on Mycale. It is said that the battle was fought on the same day as that of Plataea and that a divine rumour ran through the Greek army that their brothers had gained the day. In the action at Mycale the Athenians took the palm of valour, bursting the enemy’s line and storming his entrenchments. This victory freed Ionia; it remained only to open the Dardanelles. The Spartans returned home, but the Athenians crossed from Abydos in Asia to Sestos, the strongest fortress in the district. The place was starved into surrender; with its capture ends the story of Persia’s attempt to destroy European civilisation.
In this great Epic nothing is more obvious than the terror the Greeks felt when they first faced the Persians. The numbers arrayed against them were overwhelming, their despondency was justifiable. It required no little courage from a historian to tell the awkward truth–that Herodotus did tell it is no small testimony to his veracity. Yet only a little experience was needed to convince the Greeks that they were superior on both land and sea. Once the lesson was learned, they never forgot it. Mycale is the proof that they remembered it well. This same consciousness of superiority animated two other Greek armies, one deserted in the middle of Asia Minor, yet led unmolested by Xenophon through a hostile country to the shores of the Black Sea–the other commanded by Alexander the Great who planted Greek civilisation over every part of his conquests, from the coast to the very gates of Persia itself.
Modern history seems to have lost all powers of interesting its readers. It is as dull as political economy; it suspects a stylist, questions the accuracy of its authorities, tends to minimise personal influence on events, specialises on a narrow period, emphasises constitutional development, insists on the “economic interpretation” of an age and at times seems quite unable to manage with skill the vast stores of knowledge on which it draws. To it Herodotus is often a butt for ridicule; his credulity, inability to distinguish true causes, belief in divine influences, love of anecdote and chronological vagueness are serious blemishes. But to us Herodotus is literature; we believe that he himself laughs slyly at some of the anecdotes he has rendered more piquant by a pretended credulity; this quick-witted Greek would find it paid him to assume innocence in order to get his informers (like his critics) to go on talking. Like Froissart, Joinville, de Comines and perhaps even like Macaulay he wishes to write what will charm as well as what will instruct.
Yet as a historian Herodotus is great; he sifts evidence, some of which he mentions only to reject it; the substantial accuracy of his statements has been borne out by inscriptions; in fact, his value to-day is greater than it was last century. If a man’s literary bulk is measured by the greatness of his subject, Herodotus cannot be a mean writer. His theme is nothing less than the history of civilisation itself as far as he could record it; his broad sweep of narrative may be taken to represent the wide speculation of a philosophic historian as opposed to the narrower and more intense examination of a short period which is characteristic of the scientific historian. He tells us of the first actual armed conflict between East and West, the never-ending eternally romantic story. As Persia fought Greece, so Rome subdued Carthage, Crusader attacked Saladin, Turkey submerged half Europe, Russia contended with Japan. The atmosphere of Herodotus is the unchanging East of the Bible, inscrutable Egypt, prehistoric Russia, barbarous Thrace, as well as civilised Greece, Africa, India; had he never written, much information would have been irretrievably lost, for example, the account of one of the “Fifteen decisive battles” in history. Let him be judged not as a candidate for some Chair of Ancient History in some modern University, but as the greatest writer of the greatest prose-epic in the greatest literature of antiquity.
Of his inimitable short stories it is difficult to speak with measured praise; it is dangerous to quote them, they are so perfect that a word added or omitted might spoil them. His so-called digressions have always some cogent reason in them; they are his means of including in the panorama a scene essential to its completeness. The narrow type of history writing has been tried for some centuries; all that it seems able to accomplish is to go on narrowing itself until it cannot enjoy for recording or remembering. It is a refreshing experience to move in the broad open regions of history in which Herodotus trod. If it is impossible to combine accurate research with the ecstasy of pure literature, be it so. Herodotus will be read with joy and laughter and sometimes with tears when some of our modern historians have been superseded by persons even duller than themselves.
TRANSLATIONS:
Rawlinson’s edition with a version contains essays of the greatest value. It has been the standard for two generations and is not likely to be superseded.
The Loeb Series contains a version by A. D. Godley.
The great annotated edition of the text by R. W. Macan (Oxford) is the result of a lifetime’s work. It contains everything necessary to confirm the claims of the historian.
_The Great Persian War,_ by Grundy (London), is valuable.
See Bury, _Ancient Greek Historians_ (Macmillan).
THUCYDIDES
History, like an individual’s life, is a succession of well-defined periods. Herodotus took as his subject a long cycle of events; the shorter period was first treated by Thucydides who introduced methods which entitle him to be regarded as the first modern historian. Born in Attica in 471 he was a victim of the great plague, was exiled for his failure to check Brasidas at Eion in 424 and spent the rest of his life in collecting materials for his great work. His death took place about 402.
His preface is remarkable as outlining his creed. First he states his subject, the Peloponnesian war of 431-404; he then tests by an appeal to reason the statements in old legends and in Homer, arguing from analogy or from historical survivals in his own time to prove that various important movements were caused or checked by economic influence. He uses his imagination to prove that the importance of an event cannot be decided from the extant remains of its place of origin, for if only the ruins of both Sparta and Athens were left, Sparta would be thought to be insignificant and Athens would appear twice as powerful as she really is. Poetical exaggeration is easy and misleading, and ancient history is difficult to determine by absolute proofs.
“Men accept statements about their own national past from one another without testing them.”
“To most men the search for truth implies no effort; they prefer to turn to the first accounts available.”
“It was difficult for me to write an exact narrative of the speeches actually made; I have therefore given the words that might have been expected of each speaker, adhering to the broad meaning of what was really uttered. The facts I have not taken from any chance person, nor have I given my own impressions, but have as accurately as possible written a detailed account of what I witnessed myself or heard from others. The discovery of these facts was laborious owing to conflicting statements and confused memories and party favour. Perhaps the unromantic nature of my record will make it uninteresting; but if any person will judge it useful because he desires to consider a clear account of actual facts and of what is likely to recur at some future time, I shall be content. As a compilation it is rather an eternal possession than a prize-essay for a moment.”
The essentially modern idea of history writing is here perfectly evident.
Having pointed out the significance of the war, not only to Greece but to the whole of the world, he gives its causes. To him the real root of the trouble was Sparta’s fear of Athenian power: the alleged pretexts were different. The rise of Athens is rapidly described, her building of the walls broken down by the Persians, her control of the island-states in a Delian league which eventually became the nucleus of her Empire, her alliance with Megara, a buffer-state between herself and Corinth. This last saved her from fears of a land invasion; when she built for Megara long walls to the sea she incurred the intense anger of Corinth which smouldered for years and at last caused the Peloponnesian conflagration. The reduction of Aegina in 451 compensated for the loss of Boeotia and Egypt. Eventually the Thirty Years’ Peace was concluded in 445; Athens gave up Megara, but retained Euboea; her definite policy for the future was concentration on a maritime empire; she controlled nearly all the islands of the Aegean and was mistress of the Saronic gulf, Aegina, “the eyesore of the Peiraeus”, having fallen.
But if she was to confine her energies to the sea, it was essential that she should be mistress of all the trade-routes which in ancient history usually ran along the coast. On both east and west she found Corinth in possession; a couple of quarrels with this city ruptured the peace. In the west, Corinth had founded Corcyra (Corfu); this daughter colony quarrelled with her mother and prevailed. In itself Corcyra was of little importance in purely Greek politics, but it happened to possess a large navy and commanded the trade-route to Sicily, whence came the corn supply. When threatened with vengeance by Corinth, she appealed to Athens, where ambassadors from Corinth also appeared. Their arguments are stated in the speeches which are so characteristic of Thucydides. The Athenians after careful consideration decided to conclude a defensive alliance with Corcyra, for they dreaded the acquisition of her navy by Corinth. But circumstances turned this into an offensive alliance, for Corinth attacked and would have won a complete victory at sea but for timely Athenian succour. In the east Athens was even more vitally concerned in trade with the Hellespont, through which her own corn passed. On this route was the powerful Corinthian city Potidaea, situate on the western prong of Chalcidice. It had joined the Athenian confederacy but had secured independence by building strong walls. When the Athenians demanded their destruction and hostages as a guarantee, the town revolted and appealed to the mother-city Corinth. A long and costly siege drained Athens of much revenue and distracted her attention; but worst of all was the final estrangement of the great trade rival whom she had thwarted in Greece itself by occupying Megara, in the west by joining Corcyra, and in the east by attacking Potidsea.
The final and open pretext for war was the exclusion of Megara from all Athenian markets; this step meant the extinction of the town as a trading-centre and was a definite set-back to the economic development of the Peloponnese, of which Corinth and Megara were the natural avenues to northern Greece. The cup was full; Athenian ambition had run its course. The aggrieved states of the Peloponnese were invited to put their case at Sparta; Corinth drew a famous picture of the Athenian character, its restlessness, energy, adaptability and inventiveness. “In the face of such a rival,” they added,
“Sparta hesitates; in comparison Spartan methods are antiquated, but modern principles cannot help prevailing; in a stagnant state conservative institutions are the best, but when men are faced with various difficulties great ingenuity is essential; for that reason Athens through her wide experience has made more innovations.”
An Athenian reply failed to convince the allies of her innocence; one of the Spartan Ephors forced the congress to declare that Athens had violated the peace. A second assembly was summoned, at which the Corinthians in an estimate of the Athenian power gave reasons for believing it would eventually be reduced. They further appealed to what has never yet failed to decide in favour of war–race antagonism; the Athenians and her subjects were Ionians, whereas the Peloponnesians were mainly Dorians. The necessary vote for opening hostilities was secured; but first an ultimatum was presented. If Athens desired peace she must rescind the exclusion acts aimed at Megara. At the debate in the Athenian assembly Pericles, the virtual ruler, gave his reason for believing Athens would win; he urged a demand for the withdrawal of Spartan Alien Acts aimed at Athens and her allies and offered arbitration on the alleged grievances.
It is well to repeat the causes of this war: trade rivalry, naval competition, race animosity and desire for predominance. Till these are removed it is useless to expect permanent peace in spite of Leagues or Tribunals or Arbitration Courts. Further, it should be noted that Thucydides takes the utmost care to point out the excellent reasons the most enlightened statesmen had for arriving at contradictory conclusions; the event proved them all wrong without exception. The future had in store at least two events which no human foresight could discover, and these proved the deciding factors in the conflict.
The war began in 431 by a Theban attack on Plataea, the little town just over the Attic frontier which had been allied with Athens for nearly a century and protected her against invasion from the north. This city had long been hated by Thebes as a deserter from her own league; it alone of Boeotian towns had not joined the Persians. Burning with the desire to capture it, a body of Thebans entered the place by night, seizing the chief positions. But in the morning their scanty numbers were apparent; recovering from panic the Plataeans overwhelmed the invaders and massacred them. This open violation of the treaty kindled the war-spirit. Both sides armed, Sparta being more popular as pretending to free Greece from a tyrant. Their last ambassador on leaving Athenian territory said: “This day will be the beginning of mighty woes for Greece”.
The Spartans invaded Attica, cutting down the fruit trees and forcing the country folk into the city; the Athenians replied by ravaging parts of Peloponnese and Megara. The funeral of the first Athenian victims of the war was the occasion of a remarkable speech. Pericles in delivering it expounds the Athenian ideal of life.
“We do not compete with other constitutions, we are rather a pattern for the rest. In our democracy all are equal before the law; each man is promoted to public office not by favour but by merit, according as he can do the State some service. We love beauty in its simplicity, we love knowledge without losing manliness. Our citizens can administer affairs both private and public; our working classes have an adequate knowledge of politics. To us the most fatal error is the lack of theoretical instruction before we attempt any duty. In a word, I say that Athens is an education for all Greece; individually we can prove ourselves competent to face the most varied forms of human activity with the maximum of grace and adaptability…. We have forced the whole sea and every land to open to our enterprise. Look daily at the material power of the city and love her passionately. Her glory was won by men who did their duty and sacrificed themselves for her. The whole world is the sepulchre of famous men; their memory is not only inscribed on pillars in their own country, it lives unwritten in the hearts of men in alien lands.”
At the beginning of the next year a calamity which no statesman could have foreseen overtook Athens. A mysterious plague of the greatest malignity scourged the city, the mortality being multiplied among the crowds of refugees. The city’s strength was seriously impaired, public and private morality were undermined, inasmuch as none knew how long he had to live. Discouraged by it and by the invasions the Athenians sent a fruitless embassy to Sparta and tinned in fury on Pericles. He made a splendid defence of his policy and gave them heart to continue the struggle; he pointed out that it was better to lose their property and save the State than save their property and lose the State; their fleet opened to them the world of waters over which they could range as absolute masters. Soon afterwards he died, surviving the opening of the war only two years and a half; his character and abilities received due acknowledgment from Thucydides.
At this point Sparta decided to destroy Plataea, the Athenian outpost in Boeotia. A very brilliant description of the siege and counter-operations reveals very clearly the Spartan inability to attack walled towns and explains their objection to fortified friends. Leaving the town guarded they retired for a time, to complete the work later. The war began to spread beyond the Peloponnese to the north of the Corinthian gulf, the control of which was important to both sides. The Acarnanians were attacked by Sparta and appealed to the Athenian admiral Phormio. Two naval actions in the gulf revealed the astonishing superiority of the Athenian navy on the high seas. Threatened in her corn supply in the west, Sparta began to intrigue with the outlying kingdoms on the north-east, the “Thraceward parts” on the trade-route being the objective.
A spirit of revolt against Athenian rule appeared in Lesbos, which seceded in 428. The chief town in this non-Ionic island was Mytilene, which sent ambassadors to Sparta. Their speech clearly explains how the Athenians were able to keep their hold on their policy; her policy (like that of Rome) was to divide the allies by carefully grading their privileges, playing off the weak against the stronger. The Spartans proved unable to help and the Athenians easily blockaded the city, capturing it early in 427. In their anger they at first decided to slay all the inhabitants, but a better feeling led to a reconsideration next day. In the Assembly two great speeches were delivered. Pericles had been succeeded by Cleon, to whom Thucydides seems to have been a little unjust. He opened his speech with the famous remark that a democracy cannot govern an Empire; it is liable to sudden fits of passion which make a consistent policy impossible. He himself never changed his plans, but his audience were different.
“You are all eyes for speeches, all ears for deeds; you judge of the possibility of a project from good speeches; accomplished facts you believe not because you see them but because you hear them from smart critics. You are easily duped by some novel plan, but you refuse to adhere to what has been proved sound. You are slaves to every new oddity and have nothing but contempt for what is familiar. Every one of you would like to be a good speaker, failing that, to rival your orators in cleverness. You are as quick to guess what is coming in a speech as you are slow at foreseeing its consequences. In a word, you live in some non-real world.”
He pleaded for the rigorous application of the extreme penalty already voted.
He was opposed by Diodotus, who appealed to the same principle as Cleon did expediency.
“No penalty will deter men, not even the death penalty. Men have run through the whole catalogue of deterrents in the hope of securing themselves against outrage, yet offences still are common. Human nature is driven by some uncontrollable master passion which tempts it to danger. Hope and Desire are everywhere and are most mischievous, for they are invisible. Fortune too is as powerful a means of exciting men. At tunes she stands unexpectedly at their side and leads them to take risks with too slender resources. Most of all she tempts cities, for they are contending for the greatest prizes, liberty or domination. It is absolutely childish then to imagine that when human nature is bent on performing a thing it will be deterred by law or any other force. If revolting cities are quite sure that no mercy will be shown, they will fight to the last, bequeathing the victors only smoking ruins. It would be more expedient to be merciful and thus save the expenses of a long siege.”
This saner view prevailed. The doctrine of a “ruling passion” is a remarkable contribution to Greek political thought, the abstract personifications reading like the work of a poet or philosopher. An exciting race against time is most graphically described. After great exertions the ship bearing the reprieve arrived just in time to save Mytilene. This act of mercy stands in sinister contrast with the treatment the unhappy Plataeans received from the liberators of Greece. The citizens were captured, Athens having strangely abandoned them in spite of her promise to help. They were allowed to commemorate their services to Greece, appealing in a most moving speech to the sacred ground of their city, the scene of the immortal battle. All was in vain. The Thebans accused them of flat treachery to Boeotia, securing their condemnation. Corcyra similarly proved unprofitable; it was afflicted by fratricidal dissensions which coloured one of Thucydides’ darkest pictures. As the war went on it became clearer that it was a struggle between two rival political creeds, democracy and oligarchy. To the partisans all other ties were of little value, whether of blood or race or religion; only frenzied boldness and unquestioning obedience to a party organisation were of any consequence. This wretched spirit of feud was destined in the long run to spell the doom of the Greek cities. In 427 the first mention was made of the will-of-the-wisp which in time led Athens to her ruin. In her anxiety to intercept the Peloponnesian corn she supported Leontini against Syracuse, the leading Sicilian state. In Acarnania the capable general Demosthenes after a series of movements not quite fruitless succeeded in bringing peace to the jarring mountain tribes.
In 425 a most important event took place. As an Athenian squadron was proceeding to Sicily it was forced to put in at Pylos, where many centuries later Greece won a famous victory over the Turks. Demosthenes, though he had no official command, persuaded his comrades to fortify the place as a base from which to harry Spartan territory. It was situated in the country which had once belonged to the Messenians who for generations had been held down by the Spartan oligarchs. Deserters soon began to stream in; the gravity of the situation was recognised by the Spartan government who landed more than four hundred of their best troops on the island of Sphacteria at the entrance to the bay. These were speedily isolated by the Athenian navy; and news of the event filled all Greece with excitement. A heated discussion took place at Athens, where Cleon accused Nicias, the commander-in-chief, of slackness in not capturing the blockaded force. Spartan overtures for a peace on condition of the return of the isolated men proved vain; after a lively altercation with Nicias Cleon made a promise to capture the Spartans within thirty days, a feat which he accomplished with the aid of Demosthenes. Nearly three hundred were found to prefer surrender to death; these were conveyed to Athens and were an invaluable asset for bargaining a future peace.
A further success was the capture of Nisaea, the port of Megara, in 424, but an attempt to propagate democracy in Boeotia ended in a severe defeat at Delium; the fate of Plataea was a bad advertisement in an oligarchically governed district. Worse was to follow. Brasidas, a Spartan who had greatly distinguished himself at Pylos, passed through Thessaly with a volunteer force, reaching Thrace and capturing some important towns; the loss of one of these, Eion, caused the exile of the historian, who was too late to save it. In 423 a truce for one year was arranged between the combatants, but Brasidas ignored it, sowing disaffection among the Athenian allies. His personal charm gave them a good impression of the Spartan character and his offer of liberty was too attractive to be resisted. His success was partly due to a deliberate misrepresentation of the Athenian power which proved greater than it seemed to be. The two real obstacles to peace were Brasidas and Cleon; at Amphipolis they met in battle; a rash movement gave the Spartan an opportunity for an attack. He fell in action, but the town was saved. Cleon was killed in the same battle and the path to peace was clear. The truce for one year developed into a regular settlement in 421, Nicias being responsible for its negotiation in Athens. The chief clause provided that Athens should recover Amphipolis in exchange for the Spartan captives.
The members of the Peloponnesian league considered themselves betrayed by this treaty, for their hated rival Athens had not been humbled. Corinth was the ringleader in raising disaffection. She determined to create a new league, including Argos, the inveterate foe of Sparta. This state had stood aloof from the war, nursing her strength and biding her time for revenge. When Sparta failed to restore Amphipolis, the war party at Athens, led by Alcibiades, formed an alliance with Argos to reduce Sparta; but this policy alienated Corinth, who refused to act with her trade rival. An Argive attack on Arcadia ended in the fierce battle of Mantinea in 418, in which Sparta won a complete victory. Argos was forced to come to terms, the new league was dissolved and Athens was once more confronted by her combined enemies, her diplomacy a failure and her trump-card, the Sphacterian prisoners, lost.
Next year she was guilty of an act of sheer outrage. Her fleet descended on the island of Melos, which had remained neutral, though its inhabitants were colonists from the Spartan mainland close by. Nowhere does the dramatic nature of Thucydides’ work stand more clearly revealed than in his account of this incident. He represents the Athenian and Melian leaders as arguing the merits of the case in a regular dialogue, essentially a dramatic device. The Athenian doctrine of Might and Expediency is unblushingly preached and acted upon, in spite of Melian protests; the island was captured, its population being slain or enslaved. Such an act is a fitting prelude to the great disaster which forms the next act of Thucydides’ drama.
In 416 Athens proceeded to develop her design of subjugating Sicily. Segesta was at feud with Selinus; as the latter city applied to Syracuse for aid, the former bethought her of her ancient alliance with Athens. Next year the Sicilian ambassadors arrived with tales of unlimited wealth to finance an expedition. Nicias, the leader of the peace party, vainly counselled the Assembly to refrain; he was overborne by Alcibiades, whose ambition it was to reduce not only Sicily but Carthage also. When the expedition was about to sail most of the statues of Hermes in the city were desecrated in one night. Alcibiades, appointed to the command with Nicias and Lamachus, was suspected of the outrage, but was allowed to sail. The fleet left the city with all the pomp and ceremony of prayer and ritual, after which it showed its high spirits in racing as far as Aegina.
In Sicily itself Hermocrates, the great Syracusan patriot, repeatedly warned his countrymen of the coming storm, advising them to sink all feuds in resistance to the common enemy. He was opposed by Athenagoras, a democrat who, true to his principles, suspected the story as part of a militarist plot to overthrow the constitution. His speech is the most violent in Thucydides, but contains a passage of much value.
“The name of the whole is People, that of a part is Oligarchy; the rich are the best guardians of wealth, the educated class can make the wisest decisions, the majority are the best judges of speeches. All these classes in a democracy have equal power both