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A Day in Old Athens; a Picture of Athenian Life

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Title: A Day in Old Athens; a Picture of Athenian Life

Author: William Stearns Davis


        
Release date: December 1, 2003 [eBook #4716]
                Most recently updated: September 29, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DAY IN OLD ATHENS; A PICTURE OF ATHENIAN LIFE ***

[Illustration]




A Day In Old Athens

by William Stearns Davis

Professor of Ancient History in the University of Minnesota




Preface


This little book tries to describe what an intelligent person would see
and hear in ancient Athens, if by some legerdemain he were translated
to the fourth century B.C. and conducted about the city under competent
guidance.  Rare happenings have been omitted and sometimes, to avoid
long explanations, _probable_ matters have been stated as if they were
ascertained facts; but these instances are few, and it is hoped no
reader will be led into serious error.

The year 360 B.C. has been selected for the hypothetical time of this
visit, not because of any special virtue in that date, but because
Athens was then architecturally almost perfect, her civic and her
social life seemed at their best, the democratic constitution held its
vigor, and there were few outward signs of the general decadence which
was to set in after the triumph of Macedon.

I have endeavored to state no facts and to make no allusions, that will
not be fairly obvious to a reader who has merely an elementary
knowledge of Greek annals, such information, for instance, as may be
gained through a good secondary school history of ancient times. This
naturally has led to comments and descriptions which more advanced
students may find superfluous.

The writer has been under a heavy debt to the numerous and excellent
works on Greek “Private Antiquities” and “Public Life” written in
English, French, or German, as well as to the various great Classical
Encyclopædias and Dictionaries, and to many treatises and monographs
upon the topography of Athens and upon the numerous phases of Attic
culture.  It is proper to say, however, that the material from such
secondary sources has been merely supplementary to a careful
examination of the ancient Greek writers, with the objects of this book
kept especially in view.  A sojourn in modern Athens, also, has given
me an impression of the influence of the Attic landscape upon the
conditions of old Athenian life, an impression that I have tried to
convey in this small volume.

I am deeply grateful to my sister, Mrs. Fannie Davis Gifford, for
helpful criticism of this book while in manuscript; to my wife, for
preparing the drawings from Greek vase-paintings which appear as
illustrations; and to my friend and colleague, Professor Charles A.
Savage, for a kind and careful reading of the proofs.  Thanks also are
due to Henry Holt and Company for permission to quote material from
their edition of Von Falke’s “Greece and Rome.”

W. S. D.

University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, Minnesota.
May, 1914.


Contents

 Chapter I. The Physical Setting of Athens.
 1. The Importance of Athens in Greek History
 2. Why the Social Life of Athens is so Significant
 3. The Small Size and Sterility of Attica
 4. The Physical Beauty of Attica
 5. The Mountains of Attica
 6. The Sunlight in Attica
 7. The Topography of the City of Athens
 8. 360 B.C.—The Year of the Visit to Athens

 Chapter II. The First Sights in Athens.
 9. The Morning Crowds bound for Athens
 10. The Gate and the Street Scenes
 11. The Streets and House Fronts of Athens
 12. The Simplicity of Athenian Life

 Chapter III. The Agora and its Denizens.
 13. The Buildings around the Agora
 14. The Life in the Agora
 15. The Booths and Shops in the Agora
 16. The Flower and the Fish Vendors
 17. The Morning Visitors to the Agora
 18. The Leisured Class in Athens
 19. Familiar Types around the Agora
 20. The Barber Shops

 Chapter IV. The Athenian House and its Furnishings.
 21. Following an Athenian Gentleman Homeward
 22. The Type and Uses of a Greek House
 23. The Plan of a Greek House
 24. Modifications in the Typical Plan
 25. Rents and House Values
 26. The Simple yet Elegant Furnishings of an Athenian House

 Chapter V. The Women of Athens.
 27. How Athenian Marriages are Arranged
 28. Lack of Sentiment in Marriages
 29. Athenian Marriage Rites
 30. The Mental Horizon of Athenian Women
 31. The Honor paid Womanhood in Athens
 32. The Sphere of Action of Athenian Women

 Chapter VI. Athenian Costume.
 33. The General Nature of Greek Dress
 34. The Masculine Chiton, Himation, and Chlamys
 35. The Dress of the Women
 36. Footwear and Head Coverings
 37. The Beauty of the Greek Dress
 38. Greek Toilet Frivolities

 Chapter VII. The Slaves.
 39. Slavery an Integral Part of Greek Life
 40. The Slave Trade in Greece
 41. The Treatment of Slaves in Athens
 42. Cruel and Kind Masters
 43. The “City Slaves” of Athens

 Chapter VIII. The Children.
 44. The Desirability of Children in Athens
 45. The Exposure of Infants
 46. The Celebration of a Birth
 47. Life and Games of Young Children
 48. Playing in the Streets
 49. The First Stories and Lessons
 50. The Training of Athenian Girls

 Chapter IX. The Schoolboys of Athens.
 51. The Athenians Generally Literate
 52. Character Building the Aim of Athenian Education
 53. The Schoolboy’s Pedagogue
 54. An Athenian School
 55. The School Curriculum
 56. The Study of the Poets
 57. The Greeks do not study Foreign Languages
 58. The Study of “Music”
 59. The Moral Character of Greek Music
 60. The Teaching of Gymnastics
 61. The Habits and Ambitions of Schoolboys
 62. The “Ephebi”

 Chapter X. The Physicians of Athens.
 63. The Beginnings of Greek Medical Science
 64. Healing Shrines and their Methods
 65. An Athenian Physician’s Office
 66. The Physician’s Oath
 67. The Skill of Greek Physicians
 68. Quacks and Charlatans

 Chapter XI. The Funerals.
 69. An Athenian’s Will
 70. The Preliminaries of a Funeral
 71. Lamenting the Dead
 72. The Funeral Procession
 73. The Funeral Pyre
 74. Honors to the Memory of the Dead
 75. The Beautiful Funeral Monuments

 Chapter XII. Trade, Manufactures, and Banking.
 76. The Commercial Importance of Athens
 77. The Manufacturing Activities of Athens
 78. The Commerce of Athens
 79. The Adventurous Merchant Skippers
 80. Athenian Money-changers and Bankers
 81. A Large Banking Establishment
 82. Drawbacks to the Banking Business
 83. The Pottery of Athens
 84. Athenian Pottery an Expression of the Greek Sense of Beauty

 Chapter XIII. The Armed Forces of Athens.
 85. Military Life at Athens
 86. The Organization of the Athenian Army
 87. The Hoplites and the Light Troops
 88. The Cavalry and the Peltasts
 89. The Panoply of the Hoplites
 90. The Weapons of a Hoplite
 91. Infantry Maneuvers
 92. The Preliminaries of a Greek Battle
 93. Joining the Battle
 94. The Climax and End of the Battle
 95. The Burial Truce and the Trophy after the Battle
 96. The Siege of Fortified Towns
 97. The Introduction of New Tactics

 Chapter XIV. The Peiræus and the Shipping.
 98. The “Long Walls” down to the Harbor Town
 99. Munychia and the Havens of Athens
 100. The Glorious View from the Hill of Munychia
 101. The Town of Peiræus
 102. The Merchant Shipping
 103. The Three War Harbors and the Ship Houses
 104. The Great Naval Arsenal
 105. An Athenian Trierarch
 106. The Evolution of the Trireme
 107. The Hull of a Trireme
 108. The Rowers’ Benches of a Trireme
 109. The Cabins, Rigging, and Ram of a Trireme
 110. The Officers and Crew of a Trireme
 111. A Trireme at Sea
 112. The Tactics of a Naval Battle
 113. The Naval Strength of Athens

 Chapter XV. An Athenian Court Trial.
 114. The Frequency of Litigation in Athens
 115. Prosecutions in Athens
 116. The Preliminaries to a Trial
 117. The Athenian Jury Courts
 118. The Juryman’s Oath
 119. Opening The Trial. The Plaintiff’s Speech
 120. The Defendant’s Speech. Demonstrations by the Jury
 121. The First Verdict
 122. The Second and Final Verdict
 123. The Merits and Defects of the Athenian Courts
 124. The Usual Punishments in Athens
 125. The Heavy Penalty of Exile
 126. The Death Penalty of Athens

 Chapter XVI. The Ecclesia of Athens.
 127. The Rule of Democracy in Athens
 128. Aristocracy and Wealth. Their Status and Burdens
 129. Athenian Society truly Democratic up to a Certain Point
 130. The Voting Population of Athens
 131. Meeting Times of the Ecclesia
 132. The Pnyx (Assembly Place) at Athens
 133. The Preliminaries of the Meeting
 134. Debating a Proposition
 135. Voting at the Pnyx
 136. The Ecclesia as an Educational Instrument

 Chapter XVII. The Afternoon at the Gymnasia.
 137. The Gymnasia. Places of General Resort
 138. The Road to the Academy
 139. The Academy
 140. The Social Atmosphere and Human Types at the Academy
 141. Philosophers and Cultivated Men at the Gymnasia
 142. The Beautiful Youths at the Academy
 143. The Greek Worship of Manly Beauty
 144. The Detestation of Old Age
 145. The Greeks unite Moral and Physical Beauty
 146. The Usual Gymnastic Sports and their Objects
 147. Professional Athletes: the Pancration
 148. Leaping Contests
 149. Quoit Hurling
 150. Casting the Javelin
 151. Wrestling
 152. Foot Races
 153. The Pentathlon: the Honors paid to Great Athletes

 Chapter XVIII. Athenian Cookery and the Symposium.
 154. Greek Meal Times
 155. Society desired at Meals
 156. The Staple Articles of Food
 157. Greek Vintages
 158. Vegetable Dishes
 159. Meat and Fish Dishes
 160. Inviting Guests to a Dinner Party
 161. Preparing for the Dinner: the Sicilian Cook
 162. The Coming of the Guests
 163. The Dinner Proper
 164. Beginning the Symposium
 165. The Symposiarch and his Duties
 166. Conversation at the Symposium
 167. Games and Entertainments
 168. Going Home from the Feast: Midnight Revelers

 Chapter XIX. Country Life around Athens.
 169. The Importance of his Farm to an Athenian
 170. The Country by the Ilissus: the Greeks and Natural Beauty
 171. Plato’s Description of the Walk by the Ilissus
 172. The Athenian Love of Country Life
 173. Some Features of the Attic Country
 174. An Attic Farmstead
 175. Plowing, Reaping, and Threshing
 176. Grinding at the Mill
 177. The Olive Orchards
 178. The Vineyards
 179. Cattle, Sheep, and Goats
 180. The Gardens and the Shrine

 Chapter XX. The Temples and Gods of Athens.
 181. Certain Factors in Athenian Religion
 182. What constitutes “Piety” in Athens
 183. The Average Athenians Idea of the Gods
 184. Most Greeks without Belief in Immortality
 185. The Multitude of Images of the Gods
 186. Greek Superstition
 187. Consulting Omens
 188. The Great Oracles
 189. Greek Sacrifices
 190. The Route to the Acropolis
 191. The Acropolis of Athens
 192. The Use of Color Upon Athenian Architecture and Sculptures
 193. The Chief Buildings on the Acropolis
 194. The Parthenon
 195. A Sacrifice on the Acropolis
 196. The Interior of the Parthenon and the Great Image of Athena
 197. Greek Prayers

 Chapter XXI. The Great Festival of Athens.
 198. The Frequent Festivals in Athens
 199. The Eleusinia
 200. The Holy Procession to Eleusis
 201. The Mysteries of Eleusis
 202. The Greater Dionysia and the Drama
 203. The Theater of Dionysus
 204. The Production of a Play
 205. The Great Panathenaic Procession
 206. The View from the Temple of Wingless Victory

 Index

[Illustration: Athenian Acropolis]

Maps, Plans, and Illustrations.

  1. Athenian Acropolis
  2. Sketch Map of Attica
  3. Sketch Map of Athens
  4. Peasant going to Market
  5. At the Street Fountain
  6. A Wayside Herm
  7. A Carpenter
  8. Conjectural Plan for the house of a Wealthy Athenian
  9. Spinning
 10. The Maternal Slipper
 11. Athenian Funeral Monument
 12. At the Smithy
 13. Hoplite in Armor
 14. The Town of Peiræus and the Harbors of Athens
 15. Fishermen
 16. An Athenian Trireme
 17. The Race in Armor
 18. Itinerant Piper with his Dog
 19. Women pounding Meal
 20. Gathering the Olive Harvest
 21. Rural Sacrifice to a Wooden Statue of Dionysus
 22. Sketch Map of the Acropolis of Athens
 23. Sacrificing a Pig
 24. Athena Parthenos
 25. Comic Actors dressed as Ostriches
 26. Actor in Costume as a Fury




A Day in Old Athens




Chapter I.
The Physical Setting of Athens.


1. The Importance of Athens in Greek History.—To three ancient nations
the men of the twentieth century owe an incalculable debt. To the Jews
we owe most of our notions of religion; to the Romans we owe traditions
and examples in law, administration, and the general management of
human affairs which still keep their influence and value; and finally,
to the Greeks we owe nearly all our ideas as to the fundamentals of
art, literature, and philosophy, in fact, of almost the whole of our
intellectual life.  These Greeks, however, our histories promptly teach
us, did not form a single unified nation.  They lived in many
“city-states” of more or less importance, and some of the largest of
these contributed very little directly to our civilization.  Sparta,
for example, has left us some noble lessons in simple living and
devoted patriotism, but hardly a single great poet, and certainly never
a philosopher or sculptor.  When we examine closely, we see that the
civilized life of Greece, during the centuries when she was
accomplishing the most, was peculiarly centered at Athens.  Without
Athens, Greek history would lose three quarters of its significance,
and modern life and thought would become infinitely the poorer.


2. Why the Social Life of Athens is so Significant.—Because, then, the
contributions of Athens to our own life are so important, because they
touch (as a Greek would say) upon almost every side of “the true, the
beautiful, and the good,” it is obvious that the outward conditions
under which this Athenian genius developed deserve our respectful
attention.  For assuredly such personages as Sophocles, Plato, and
Phidias were not isolated creatures, who developed their genius apart
from, or in spite of, the life about them, but rather were the ripe
products of a society, which in its excellences and weaknesses presents
some of the most interesting pictures and examples in the world.  To
understand the Athenian civilization and genius it is not enough to
know the outward history of the times, the wars, the laws, and the
lawmakers.  We must see Athens as the average man saw it and lived in
it from day to day, and _then_ perhaps we can partially understand how
it was that during the brief but wonderful era of Athenian freedom and
prosperity[*], Athens was able to produce so many men of commanding
genius as to win for her a place in the history of civilization which
she can never lose.

[*] That era may be assumed to begin with the battle of Marathon (490
B.C.), and it certainly ended in 322 B.C., when Athens passed
decisively under the power of Macedonia; although since the battle of
Chæroneia (338 B.C.) she had done little more than keep her liberty on
sufferance.


3. The Small Size and Sterility of Attica.—Attica was a very small
country according to modern notions, and Athens the only large city
therein.  The land barely covered some 700 square miles, with 40 square
miles more, if one includes the dependent island of Salamis. It was
thus far smaller than the smallest of our American “states” (Rhode
Island = 1250 square miles), and was not so large as many American
counties.  It was really a triangle of rocky, hill-scarred land thrust
out into the Ægean Sea, as if it were a sort of continuation of the
more level district of Bœotia. Yet small as it was, the hills inclosing
it to the west, the seas pressing it form the northeast and south, gave
it a unity and isolation all its own. Attica was not an island; but it
could be invaded only by sea, or by forcing the resistance which could
be offered at the steep mountain passes towards Bœotia or Megara. 
Attica was thus distinctly separated from the rest of Greece.  Legends
told how, when the half-savage Dorians had forced themselves southward
over the mainland, they had never penetrated into Attica; and the
Athenians later prided themselves upon being no colonists from afar,
but upon being “earth-sprung,”—natives of the soil which they and their
twenty-times grandfathers had held before them.


[Illustration:  Sketch map of Attica]


This triangle of Attica had its peculiar shortcomings and virtues. It
was for the most part stony and unfertile.  Only a shallow layer of
good soil covered a part of its hard foundation rock, which often in
turn lay bare on the surface.  The Athenian farmer had a sturdy
struggle to win a scanty crop, and about the only products he could
ever raise in abundance for export were olives (which seemed to thrive
on scanty soil and scanty rainfall) and honey, the work of the mountain
bees.


4. The Physical Beauty of Attica.—Yet Attica had advantages which more
than counterbalanced this grudging of fertility.  All Greece, to be
sure, was favored by the natural beauty of its atmosphere, seas, and
mountains, but Attica was perhaps the most favored portion of all,
Around her coasts, rocky often and broken by pebbly beaches and little
craggy peninsulas, surged the deep blue Ægean, the most glorious
expanse of ocean in the world.  Far away spread the azure
water[*],—often foam-crested and sometimes alive with the dolphins
leaping at their play,—reaching towards a shimmering sky line where
rose “the isles of Greece,” masses of green foliage, or else of tawny
rock, scattered afar, to adapt the words of Homer, “like shields laid
on the face of the glancing deep.”

[*] The peculiar blueness of the water near Attica is probably caused
by the clear rocky bottom of the sea, as well as by the intensity of
the sunlight.


Above the sea spread the noble arch of the heavens,—the atmosphere
often dazzlingly bright, and carrying its glamour and sparkle almost
into the hearts of men.  The Athenians were proud of the air about
their land.  Their poets gladly sung its praises, as, for example,
Euripides[*], when he tells how his fellow countrymen enjoy being—

Ever through air clear shining brightly
As on wings uplifted, pacing lightly.


[*] Medea:829.


5. The Mountains of Attica.—The third great element, besides the sea
and the atmosphere of Athens, was the mountains.  One after another the
bold hills reared themselves, cutting short all the plainlands and
making the farmsteads often a matter of slopes and terraces.  Against
the radiant heavens these mountains stood out boldly, clearly;
revealing all the little gashes and seams left from that long-forgotten
day when they were flung forth from the bowels of the earth.  None of
these mountains was very high:  Hymettus, the greatest, was only about
3500 feet; but rising as they often did from a close proximity to the
sea, and not from a dwarfing table-land, even the lower hills uplifted
themselves with proud majesty.

These hills were of innumerable tints according to their rocks, the hue
of the neighboring sea, and the hour of the day.  In spring they would
be clothed in verdant green, which would vanish before the summer
heats, leaving them rosy brown or gray.  But whatever the fundamental
tone, it was always brilliant; for the Athenians lived in a land where
blue sky, blue sea, and the massive rock blent together into such a
galaxy of shifting color, that, in comparison, the lighting of almost
any northern or western landscape would seem feeble and tame.  The
Athenians absorbed natural beauty with their native air.


6. The Sunlight in Athens.—The Athenian loved sunshine, and Helios the
Sun God was gracious to his prayers.  In the Athens of to-day it is
reckoned that the year averages 179 days in which the sun is not
concealed by clouds one instant; and 157 days more when the sun is not
hidden more than half an hour[*].  Ancient Athens was surely not more
cloudy.  Nevertheless, despite this constant sunshine and a southern
latitude, Athens was stricken relatively seldom with semitropical heat.
 The sea was a good friend, bringing tempering breezes.  In the short
winter there might be a little frost, a little snow, and a fair supply
of rain.  For the rest of the year, one golden day was wont to succeed
another, with the sun and the sea breeze in ever friendly rivalry.

[*] The reason for these many clear days is probably because when the
moist west and southwest winds come in contact with the dry, heated air
of the Attic plain, they are at once volatilized and dispersed, not
condensed (as in northern lands); therefore the day resolves itself
into brilliant sunshine.


The climate saved the Athenians from being obliged to wage a stern
warfare with nature as did the northern peoples.  Their life and
civilization could be one developed essentially “in the open air”;
while, on the other hand, the bracing sea breeze saved them from that
enervating lethargy which has ruined so many southern folk. The scanty
soil forced them to struggle hard to win a living; unless they yielded
to the constant beckoning of the ocean, and sought food, adventure,
wealth, and a great empire across the seas.


7. The Topography of the City of Athens.—So much for the land of Attica
in general; but what of the setting of the city of Athens itself?  The
city lay in a plain, somewhat in the south central part of Attica, and
about four miles back from the sea.  A number of mountains came
together to form an irregular rectangle with the Saronic Gulf upon the
south.  To the east of Athens stretched the long gnarled ridge of
Hymettus, the wildest and grayest mountain in Attica, the home of bees
and goatherds, and (if there be faith in pious legend) of innumerable
nymphs and satyrs.  To the west ran the lower, browner mountains,
Ægaleos, across which a road (the “Sacred Way”) wound through an easy
pass towards Eleusis, the only sizable town in Attica, outside of
Athens and its harbors.  To the rear of the plain rose a noble pyramid,
less jagged than Hymettus, more lordly than Ægaleos; its summits were
fretted with a white which turned to clear rose color under the sunset.
 This was Pentelicus, from the veins whereof came the lustrous marble
for the master sculptor.  Closer at hand, nearer the center of the
plain, rose a small and very isolated hill,—Lycabettus, whose peaked
summit looked down upon the roofs of Athens.  And last, but never
least, about one mile southwest of Lycabettus, upreared a natural
monument of much greater frame,—not a hill, but a colossal rock.  Its
shape was that of an irregular oval; it was about 1000 feet long, 500
feet wide, and its level summit stood 350 feet above the plain. This
steep, tawny rock, flung by the Titans, one might dream, into the midst
of the Attic plain, formed one of the most famous sites in the world,
for it was the Acropolis of Athens.  Its full significance, however,
must be explained later.  From the Acropolis and a few lesser hills
close by, the land sloped gently down towards the harbors and the
Saronic Bay.


[Illustration: Sketch map of Athens]


These were the great features of the outward setting of Athens.  One
might add to them the long belt of dark green olive groves winding down
the westward side of the plain, where the Cephisus (which along among
Attic rivulets did not run dry in summer) ran down to the sea.  There
was also a shorter olive belt west of the city, where the weaker
Ilissus crept, before it lost itself amid the thirsty fields.

Sea, rock, and sky, then, joined together around Athens as around
almost no other city in the world.  The landscape itself was adjusted
to the eye with marvelous harmony.  The colors and contours formed one
glorious model for the sculptor and the painter, one perpetual
inspiration for the poet.  Even if Athens had never been the seat of a
famous race, she would have won fame as being situated in one of the
most beautiful localities in the world.  Rightly, therefore, did its
dwellers boast of their city as the “Violet-crowned” (_Iostephanos_).


8. 360 B.C.—The Year of the Visit to Athens.—This city let us visit in
the days of its greatest outward glory.  We may select the year 360
B.C.  At that time Athens had recovered from the ravages of the
Peloponnesian War, while the Macedonian peril had not as yet become
menacing.  The great public buildings were nearly all completed.  No
signs of material decadence were visible, and if Athens no longer
possessed the wide naval empire of the days of Pericles, her fleets and
her armies were still formidable.  The harbors were full of commerce;
the philosophers were teaching their pupils in the groves and
porticoes; the democratic constitution was entirely intact.  With
intelligent vision we will enter the city and look about us.




Chapter II.
The First Sights in Athens.


9. The Morning Crowds bound for Athens.—It is very early in the
morning.  The sun has just pushed above the long ridge of Hymettus,
sending a slanting red bar of light across the Attic plain, and
touching the opposite slopes of Ægaleos with livid fire.  Already,
however, life is stirring outside the city.  Long since, little market
boats have rowed across the narrow strait from Salamis, bringing the
island farmer’s produce, and other farmers from the plain and the
mountain slopes have started for market.  In the ruddy light the marble
temples on the lofty Acropolis rising ahead of these hurrying rustics
are standing out clearly; the spear and helmet of the great brazen
statue of the Athena Promachos are flashing from the noble citadel, as
a kind of day beacon, beckoning onward toward the city.  From the
Peiræus, the harbor town, a confused hum of mariners lading and
unlading vessels is even now rising, but we cannot turn ourselves
thither.  Our route is to follow the farmers bound for market.

The most direct road from the Peiræus to Athens is hidden indeed, for
it leads between the towering ramparts of the “Long Walls,” two mighty
barriers which run parallel almost four miles from the inland city to
the harbor, giving a guarded passage in wartime and making Athens safe
against starvation from any land blockade; but there is an outside road
leading also to Athens from the western farmsteads, and this we can
conveniently follow.  Upon this route the crowd which one meets is
certainly not aristocratic, but it is none the less Athenian.  Here
goes a drover, clad in skins, his legs wound with woolen bands in lieu
of stockings; before him and his wolf-like dog shambles a flock of
black sheep or less manageable goats, bleating and baaing as they are
propelled toward market. After him there may come an unkempt,
long-bearded farmer flogging on a pack ass or a mule attached to a
clumsy cart with solid wheels, and laden with all kinds of market
produce.  The roadway, be it said, is not good, and all carters have
their troubles; therefore, there is a deal of gesticulating and profane
invocation of Hermes and all other gods of traffic; for, early as it
is, the market place is already filling, and every delay promises a
loss.  There are still other companions bound toward the city: 
countrymen bearing cages of poultry; others engaged in the uncertain
calling of driving pigs; swarthy Oriental sailors, with rings in their
ears, bearing bales of Phœnician goods from the Peiræus; respectable
country gentlemen, walking gravely in their best white mantles and
striving to avoid the mud and contamination; and perhaps also a small
company of soldiers, just back from foreign service, passes, clattering
shields and spear staves.


[Illustration: Peasant going to Market]


10. The Gate and the Street Scenes.—The crowds grow denser as everybody
approaches the frequented “Peiræus Gate,” for nearly all of Attica
which lies within easy reach of Athens has business in the Market Place
every morning.  On passing the gate a fairly straight way leads through
the city to the market, but progress for the multitude becomes slow. 
If it is one of the main thoroughfares, it is now very likely to be
almost blocked with people.  There are few late risers at Athens; the
Council of Five Hundred[*], the huge Jury Courts, and the Public
Assembly (if it has met to-day[+]) are appointed to gather at sunrise. 
The plays in the theater, which, however, are given only on certain
festivals, begin likewise at sunrise.  The philosophers say that “the
man who would accomplish great things must be up while yet it is dark.”
 Athenians, therefore, are always awake and stirring at an hour when
men of later ages and more cold and foggy climes will be painfully
yawning ere getting out of bed.

[*] The “Boule,” the great standing committee of the Athenian people to
aid the magistrates in the government.


[+] In which case, of course, the regular courts and the Council would
hardly meet.


[Illustration: At the Street Fountain]


The Market Place attracts the great masses, but by no means all; hither
and thither bevies of sturdy slave girls, carrying graceful pitchers on
their heads, are hurrying towards the fountains which gush cool water
at most of the street corners.  Theirs is a highly necessary task, for
few or no houses have their own water supply; and around each fountain
one can see half a dozen by no means slatternly maidens, splashing and
flirting the water one at another, while they wait their turn with the
pitchers, and laugh and exchange banter with the passing farmers’ lads.
 Many in the street crowds are rosy-cheeked schoolboys, walking
decorously, if they are lads of good breeding, and blushing modestly
when they are greeted by their fathers’ acquaintances.  They do not
loiter on the way. Close behind, carrying their writing tablets, follow
the faithful ‘pedagogues,’ the body-servants appointed to conduct them
to school, give them informal instruction, and, if need be, correct
their faults in no painless manner.  Besides the water maids and the
schoolboys, from the innumerable house doors now opening the respective
masters are stepping forth—followed by one, two, or several serving
varlets, as many as their wealth affords.  All these join in the crowd
entering from the country.  “Athenian democracy” always implies a
goodly amount of hustling and pushing. No wonder the ways are a busy
sight!


11. The Streets and House Fronts of Athens.—Progress is slower near the
Market Place because of the extreme narrowness of the streets. They are
only fifteen feet wide or even less,—intolerable alleys a later age
would call them,—and dirty to boot.  Sometimes they are muddy, more
often extremely dusty.  Worse still, they are contaminated by great
accumulations of filth; for the city is without an efficient sewer
system or regular scavengers.  Even as the crowd elbows along, a house
door will frequently open, an ill-favored slave boy show his head, and
with the yell, “Out of the way!” slap a bucket of dirty water into the
street.  There are many things to offend the nose as well as the eyes
of men of a later race.  It is fortunate indeed that the Athenians are
otherwise a healthy folk, or they would seem liable to perpetual
pestilence; even so, great plagues have in past years harried the
city[*].

[*] The most fearful thereof was the great plague of 430 B.C. (during
the Peloponnesian War), which nearly ruined Athens.


The first entrance to Athens will thus bring to a stranger, full of the
city’s fame and expectant of meeting objects of beauty at every turn,
almost instant disappointment.  The narrow, dirty, ill-paved streets
are also very crooked.  One can readily be lost in a labyrinth of
filthy little lanes the moment one quits the few main thoroughfares. 
High over head, to be sure, the red crags of the Acropolis may be
towering, crowned with the red, gold, and white tinted marble of the
temples, but all around seems only monotonous squalor.  The houses seem
one continuous series of blank walls; mostly of one, occasionally of
two stories, and with flat roofs. These walls are usually spread over
with some dirty gray or perhaps yellow stucco.  For most houses, the
only break in the street walls are the simple doors, all jealously
barred and admitting no glance within.  There are usually no street
windows, if the house is only one story high.  If it has two stories, a
few narrow slits above the way may hint that here are the apartments
for the slaves or women.  There are no street numbers.  There are often
no street names.  “So-and-so lives in such-and-such a quarter, near the
Temple of Heracles;” that will enable you to find a householder, after
a few tactful questions from the neighbors; and after all, Athens is a
relatively small city[*] (as great cities are reckoned), very closely
built, and her regular denizens do not feel the need of a directory.

[* ]Every guess at the population of Athens rests on mere conjecture;
yet, using the scanty data which we possess, it seems possible that
_the population of all Attica_ at the height of its prosperity was
about _200,000 free persons_ (including the _metics_—resident
foreigners without citizenship); and a rather smaller number of
slaves—say 150,000 or less.  Of this total of some 350,000, probably
something under one half resided in the city of Athens during times of
peace, the rest in the outlying farms and villages.  _Athens may be
imagined as a city of about 150,000_—possibly a trifle more. During
serious wars there would be of course a general removal into the city.


So the crowd elbows its way onward:  now thinning, now gaining, but the
main stream always working towards the Market Place.


12.  The Simplicity of Athenian Life.—It is clear we are entering a
city where nine tenths of what the twentieth century will consider the
“essential conveniences” of life are entirely lacking; where men are
trying to be civilized—or, as the Greeks would say, to lay hold upon
“the true, the beautiful, and the good,” without even the absolute
minimum of those things which people of a later age will believe
separate a “civilized man” from a “barbarian.”  The gulf between old
Athens and, for instance, new Chicago is greater than is readily
supposed[*].  It is easy enough to say that the Athenians lacked such
things as railways, telephones, gas, grapefruit, and cocktails.  All
such matters we realize were not known by our fathers and grandfathers,
and we are not yet so removed from _them_ that we cannot transport
ourselves in imagination back to the world of say 1820 A.D.; but the
Athenians are far behind even our grandfathers.  When we investigate,
we will find conditions like these—houses absolutely without plumbing,
beds without sheets, rooms as hot or as cold as the outer air, only far
more drafty.  We must cross rivers without bridges; we must fasten our
clothes (or rather our “two pieces of cloth”) with two pins instead of
with a row of buttons; we must wear sandals without stockings (or go
barefoot); must warm ourselves over a pot of ashes; judge plays or
lawsuits on a cold winter morning sitting in the open air; we must
study poetry with very little aid from books, geography without real
maps, and politics without newspapers; and lastly, “we must learn how
to be civilized without being comfortable!”[+]

[*] See the very significant comment on the physical limitations of the
old Athenian life in Zimmern’s “_The Greek Commonwealth_,” p. 209.


[+] Zimmern, _ibid_.


Or, to reverse the case:  we must understand that an Athenian would
have pronounced our boasted “civilization” hopelessly artificial, and
our life so dependent on outward material props and factors as to be
scarcely worth the living.  He would declare himself well able to live
happily under conditions where the average American or Englishman would
be cold, semi-starved, and miserable.  He would declare that _his_ woe
or happiness was retained far more under his own control than we retain
ours, and that we are worthy of contemptuous pity rather than of
admiration, because we have refined our civilization to such a point
that the least accident, _e.g._ the suspension of rail traffic for a
few days, can reduce a modern city to acute wretchedness.

Probably neither the twentieth century in its pride, nor the fourth
century B.C. in its contempt, would have all the truth upon its
side.[*]  The difference in viewpoint, however, must still stand.
Preëminently Athens may be called the “City of the Simple Life.”
Bearing this fact in mind, we may follow the multitude and enter the
Marketplace; or, to use the name that stamps it as a peculiarly Greek
institution,—the Agora.

[*] The mere matter of _climate_ would of course have to come in as a
serious factor.  The Athenian would have found his life becoming
infinitely more complex along the material side when he tried to live
like a “_kalos-k’agathos_”—_i.e._ a “noble and good man,” or a
“gentleman,”—in a land where the thermometer might sink to 15° below
zero Fahrenheit (or even lower) from time to time during the winter.




Chapter III.
The Agora and its Denizens.


13.  The Buildings around the Agora.—Full market time![*]  The great
plaza of the Agora is buzzing with life.  The contrast between the
dingy, dirty streets and this magnificent public plaza is startling.
The Athenians manifestly care little for merely private display, rather
they frown upon it; their wealth, patriotism, and best artistic energy
seem all lavished upon their civic establishments and buildings.

[*] Between nine and twelve A.M.


The Agora is a square of spacious dimensions, planted here and there
with graceful bay trees.  Its greatest length runs north and south. 
Ignoring for the time the teeming noisy swarms of humanity, let our
eyes be directed merely upon the encircling buildings.  The place is
almost completely enclosed by them, although not all are of equal
elegance or pretension.  Some are temples of more or less size, like
the temple of the “Paternal Apollo” near the southwestern angle; or the
“Metroön,” the fane of Cybele “the Great Mother of the Gods,” upon the
south.  Others are governmental buildings; somewhat behind the Metroön
rise the imposing pillars of the Council House, where the Five Hundred
are deliberating on the policy of Athens; and hard by that is the
Tholos, the “Round House,” with a peaked, umbrella-shaped roof, beneath
which the sacred public hearth fire is ever kept burning, and where the
presiding Committee of the Council[*] and certain high officials take
their meals, and a good deal of state business is transacted.  The
majority of these buildings upon the Agora, however, are covered
promenades, porticoes, or stoæ.

[*] This select committee was known technically as the “_Prytanes_.”


The stoæ are combinations of rain shelters, shops, picture galleries,
and public offices.  Turn under the pillars of the “Royal Stoa” upon
the west, and you are among the whispering, nudging, intent crowd of
listeners, pushing against the barriers of a low court. Long rows of
jurors are sitting on their benches; the “King Archon” is on the
president’s stand, and some poor wight is being arraigned on a charge
of “Impiety”[*]; while on the walls behind stand graved and ancient
laws of Draco and Solon.

[*] The so-called “King Archon” had special cognizance of most cases
involving religious questions; and his court was in this stoa.


[Illustration: A Wayside Herm]


Cross the square, and on the opposite side is one of the most
magnificent of the porticoes, the “Painted Porch” (“_Stoa Poikilë_”), a
long covered walk, a delightful refuge alike from sun and rain. Almost
the entire length of the inner walls (for it has columns only on the
side of the Agora) is covered with vivid frescoes.  Here Polygnotus and
other master painters have spread out the whole legendary story of the
capture of Troy and of the defeat of the Amazons; likewise the more
historical tale of the battle of Marathon. Yet another promenade, the
“Stoa of Zeus,” is sacred to Zeus, Giver of Freedom.  The walls are not
frescoed, but hung with the shields of valiant Athenian warriors.

In the open spaces of the plaza itself are various altars, _e.g._ to
the “Twelve Gods,” and innumerable statues of local worthies, as of
Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the tyrant-slayers; while across the
center, cutting the Market Place from east to west, runs a line of
stone posts, each surmounted with a rude bearded head of Hermes, the
trader’s god; and each with its base plastered many times over with all
kinds of official and private placards and notices.


14.  The Life in the Agora.—So much for the physical setting of the
Agora:  of far greater interest surely are the people.  The whole
square is abounding with noisy activity.  If an Athenian has no actual
business to transact, he will at least go to the Agora to get the
morning news.  Two turns under the “Painted Porch” will tell him the
last rumor as to the foreign policy of Thebes;  whether it is true that
old King Agesilaus has died at Sparta; whether corn is likely to be
high, owning to a failure of crops in the Euxine (Black Sea) region;
whether the “Great King” of Persia is prospering in his campaign
against Egypt.  The crowd is mostly clad in white, though often the
cloaks of the humbler visitors are dirty, but there is a sprinkling of
gay colors,—blue, orange, and pink.  Everybody is talking at once in
melodious Attic; everybody (since they are all true children of the
south) is gesticulating at once.  To the babel of human voices is added
the wheezing whistle of donkeys, the squealing of pigs, the cackle of
poultry.  Besides, from many of the little factories and workshops on
or near the Agora a great din is rising.  The clamor is prodigious. 
Criers are stalking up and down the square, one bawling out that
Andocides has lost a valuable ring and will pay well to recover it;
another the Pheidon has a desirable horse that he will sell cheap.  One
must stand still for some moments and let eye and ear accustom
themselves to such utter confusion.


15.  The Booths and Shops in the Agora.—At length out of the chaos
there seems to emerge a certain order.  The major part of the square is
covered with little booths of boards and wicker work, very frail and
able to be folded up, probably every night.  There are little lanes
winding amid these booths; and each manner of huckster has its own
especial “circle” or section of the market.  “Go to the wine,” “to the
fish,” “to the myrtles” (_i.e._ the flowers), are common directions for
finding difficult parts of the Agora.  Trade is mostly on a small
scale,—the stock of each vendor is distinctly limited in its range, and
Athens is without “department stores.”  Behind each low counter, laden
with its wares, stands the proprietor, who keeps up a din from leathern
lungs:  “Buy my oil!”  “Buy charcoal!” “Buy sausage!” etc., until he is
temporarily silenced while dealing with a customer.


[Illustration: A Carpenter]


In one “circle” may be found onions and garlic (a favorite food of the
poor); a little further on are the dealers in wine, fruit, and garden
produce.  Lentils and peas can be had either raw, or cooked and ready
to eat on the spot.  An important center is the bread market.  The huge
cylindrical loaves are handed out by shrewd old women with proverbially
long tongues.  Whosoever upsets one of their delicately balanced piles
of loaves is certain of an artistic tongue lashing.  Elsewhere there is
a pottery market, a clothes market, and, nearer the edge of the Agora,
are “circles,” where objects of real value are sold, like jewelry,
chariots, good furniture.  In certain sections, too, may be seen
strong-voiced individuals, with little trays swung by straps before
them, pacing to and fro, and calling out, not foods, but medicines,
infallible cure-alls for every human distemper.  Many are the unwary
fools who patronize them.


16.  The Flower and the Fish Vendors.—Two circles attract especial
attention, the Myrtles and the Fish.  Flowers and foliage, especially
when made up into garlands, are absolutely indispensable to the average
Greek.  Has he a great family festival, _e.g._ the birth of a son, then
every guest should wear a crown of olives; is it a wedding, then one of
flowers.[*]  Oak-leaves do the honors for Zeus; laurel for Apollo;
myrtle for Aphrodite (and is not the Love-Goddess the favorite?).  To
have a social gathering without garlands, in short, is impossible.  The
flower girls of Athens are beautiful, impudent, and not at all prudish.
 Around their booths press bold-tongued youths, and not too discreet
sires; and the girls can call everybody familiarly by name.  Very
possibly along with the sale of the garlands they make arrangements (if
the banquet is to be of the less respectable kind) to be present in the
evening themselves, perhaps in the capacity of flute girls.

[*] The Greeks lacked many of our common flowers.  Their ordinary
flowers were white violets, narcissus, lilies, crocuses, blue
hyacinths, and roses (“the Flower of Zeus”).  The usual garland was
made of myrtle or ivy and then entwined with various flowers.


More reputable, though not less noisy, is the fish market.  Athenians
boast themselves of being no hearty “meat eaters” like their Bœotian
neighbors, but of preferring the more delicate fish.  No dinner party
is successful without a seasonable course of fish.  The arrival of a
fresh cargo from the harbor is announced by the clanging of a bell,
which is likely to leave all the other booths deserted, while a crowd
elbows around the fishmonger.  He above all others commands the
greatest flow of billingsgate, and is especially notorious for his
arrogant treatment of his customers, and for exacting the uttermost
farthing.  The “Fish” and the “Myrtles” can be sure of a brisk trade on
days when all the other booth keepers around the Agora stand idle.

All this trade, of course, cannot find room in the booths of the open
Agora.  Many hucksters sit on their haunches on the level ground with
their few wares spread before them.  Many more have little stands
between the pillars of the stoæ; and upon the various streets that
converge on the market there is a fringe of shops, but these are
usually of the more substantial sort.  Here are the barbers’ shops, the
physicians’ offices (if the good leech is more than an itinerant
quack), and all sorts of little factories, such as smithies, where the
cutler’s apprentices in the rear of the shop forge the knives which the
proprietor sells over the counter, the slave repositories, and finally
wine establishments of no high repute, where wine may not merely be
bought by the skin (as in the main Agora), but by the potful to be
drunk on the premises.


17.  The Morning Visitors to the Agora.—The first tour of inspection
completed, several facts become clear to the visitor.  One is the
extraordinarily large proportion of _men_ among the moving multitudes.
Except for the bread women and the flower girls, hardly one female is
to be found among the sellers.  Among the purchasers there is not a
single reputable lady.  No Athenian gentlewoman dreams of frequenting
the Agora.  Even a poor man’s wife prefers to let her spouse do the
family marketing.  As for the “men folk,” the average gentleman will go
daily indeed to the Agora, but if he is really pretentious, it will be
merely to gossip and to meet his friends; a trusted servant will attend
to the regular purchasing.  Only when an important dinner party is on
hand will the master take pains to order for himself.  If he does
purchase in person, he will never _carry_ anything himself.  The slaves
can attend to that; and only the slaveless (the poorest of all) must
take away their modest rations of boiled lentils, peas, beans, onions,
and garlic, usually in baskets, though yonder now is a soldier who is
bearing off a measure of boiled peas inside his helmet.

Another thing is striking.  The average poor Athenian seems to have no
purse.  Or rather he uses the purse provided by nature.  At every booth
one can see unkempt buyers solemnly taking their small change from
their mouths.[*]  Happy the people that has not learned the twentieth
century wisdom concerning microbes!  For most Athenians seem
marvelously healthy.

[*] A wealthier purchaser would, of course, have his own pouch, or more
probably one carried for him by a slave.


Still one other fact is brought home constantly.  “Fixed prices” are
absolutely unknown.  The slightest transaction involves a war of
bargaining.  Wits are matched against wits, and only after a vast deal
of wind do buyer and seller reach a fair compromise.  All this makes
retail trade in the Agora an excellent school for public affairs or
litigation.


18.  The Leisured Class in Athens.—Evidently Athens, more than many
later-day cities, draws clear lines between the workers and the
“gentlemen of leisure.”  There is no distinction of dress between the
numerous slaves and the humbler free workers and traders; but there is
obvious distinction between the artisan of bent shoulders who shambles
out of yonder pungent tannery, with his scant garments girded around
him, and the graceful gentleman of easy gestures and flowing drapery
who moves towards the Tholos.  There is great _political_ democracy in
Athens, but not so much _social_ democracy. “Leisure,” _i.e._ exemption
from every kind of sordid, money-getting, hard work, is counted the
true essential for a respectable existence, and to live on the effort
of others and to devote oneself to public service or to letters and
philosophy is the open satisfaction or the private longing of every
Athenian.

A great proportion of these, therefore, who frequent the Agora are not
here on practical business, unless they have official duties at the
government offices.[*]  But in no city of any age has the gracious art
of doing nothing been brought to such perfection. The Athenians are an
intensely gregarious people.  Everybody knows everybody else.  Says an
orator, “It is impossible for a man to be either a rascal or an honest
man in this city without your all knowing it.”  Few men walk long
alone; if they do keep their own company, they are frowned on as
“misanthropes.”  The morning visit to the Agora “to tell or to hear
some new thing”[+] will be followed by equally delightful idling and
conversation later in the day at the Gymnasia, and later still,
probably, at the dinner-party.  Easy and unconventional are the
personal greetings.  A little shaking out of the mantle, an
indescribable flourish with the hands.  A free Greek will despise
himself for “bowing,” even to the Great King.  To clasp hands implies
exchanging a pledge, something for more than mere salutation.

“_Chaire_, Aristomenes!”

“_Chaire_, Cleandros!”

Such is the usual greeting, using an expressive word which can mean
equally well “hail!” and “farewell!”

[*] To serve the state in any official capacity (usually without any
salary attached to the office) would give the highest satisfaction to
any Greek.  The desire for participation in public affairs might be
described as a mania.


[+] Acts of the Apostles, 17:21.


19.  Familiar Types around the Agora.—These animated, eager-faced men
whose mantles fall in statuesque folds prefer obviously to walk under
the Painted Porch, or the blue roof of heaven, while they evolve their
philosophies, mature their political schemes, or organize the material
for their orations and dramas, rather than to bend over desks within
close offices.  Around the Athenian Agora, a true type of this
preference, and busy with this delightful idleness, half a century
earlier could have been seen a droll figure with “indescribable nose,
bald head, round body, eyes rolling and twinkling with good humor,”
scantily clad,—an incorrigible do-nothing, windbag, and hanger-on, a
later century might assert,—yet history has given to him the name of
Socrates.

Not all Athenians, of course, make such justifiable use of their
idleness.  There are plenty of young men parading around in long
trailing robes, their hair oiled and curled most effeminately, their
fingers glittering with jewels,—“ring-loaded, curly-locked coxcombs,”
Aristophanes, the comic poet, has called them,—and they are here only
for silly display.  Also there are many of their elders who have no
philosophy or wit to justify their continuous talking; nevertheless,
all considered, it must be admitted that the Athenian makes a use of
their dearly loved “leisure,” which men of a more pragmatic race will
do well to consider as the fair equivalent of much frantic zeal for
“business.”  Athenian “leisure” has already given the world Pericles,
Thucydides, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, and Plato, not to
name such artists as Phidias, whose profession cannot exempt them from
a certain manual occupation.


20.  The Barber Shops.—This habit of genteel idleness naturally
develops various peculiar institutions.  For example, the barber shops
are almost club rooms.  Few Hellenes at this time shave their
beards[*], but to go with unkempt whiskers and with too long hair is
most disgraceful.  The barber shops, booths, or little rooms let into
the street walls of the houses, are therefore much frequented. The good
tonsors have all the usual arts.  They can dye gray hair brown or
black; they can wave or curl their patrons’ locks (and an artificially
curled head is no disgrace to a man).  Especially, they keep a good
supply of strong perfumes; for many people will want a little scent on
their hair each morning, even if they wish no other attention.  But it
is not an imposition to a barber to enter his shop, yet never move
towards his low stool before the shining steel mirror.  Anybody is
welcome to hang around indefinitely, listening to the proprietor’s
endless flow of talk.  He will pride himself on knowing every possible
bit of news or rumor:  Had the Council resolved on a new fleet-building
program?  Had the Tyrant of Syracuse’s “four” the best chance in the
chariot race in the next Olympic games?  The garrulity of barbers is
already proverbial.

[*] Alexander the Great (336-323 B.C.) required his soldiers to be
shaved (as giving less grasp for the enemy!), and the habit then spread
generally through the whole Hellenic world.


“How shall I cut your hair, sir?” once asked the court tonsure of King
Archeläus of Macedon.

“In silence,” came the grim answer.

But the proprietor will not do all the talking.  Everybody in the
little room will join.  Wits will sharpen against wits; and if the
company is of a grave and respectable sort, the conversation will grow
brisk upon Plato’s theory of the “reality of ideas,” upon Euripides’s
interpretation of the relations of God to man, or upon the spiritual
symbolism of Scopas’s bas-reliefs at Halicarnassus.

The barber shops by the Agora then are essential portions of Athenian
social life.  Later we shall see them supplemented by the Gymnasia;—but
the Agora has detained us long enough.  The din and crowds are
lessening.  People are beginning to stream homeward. It lacks a little
of noon according to the “time-staff” (_gnomon_), a simple sun dial
which stands near one of the porticoes, and we will now follow some
Athenian gentleman towards his dwelling.




Chapter IV.
The Athenian House and its Furnishings.


21.  Following an Athenian Gentleman Homeward.—Leaving the Agora and
reëntering the streets the second impression of the residence districts
becomes more favorable.  There are a few bay trees planted from block
to block; and ever and anon the monotonous house walls recede, giving
space to display some temple, like the Fane of Hephæstos[*] near the
Market Place, its columns and pediment flashing not merely with white
marble, but with the green, scarlet, and gold wherewith the Greeks did
not hesitate to decorate their statuary.

[*] Wrongly called the “Theseum” in modern Athens.


At street corners and opposite important mansions a Hermes-bust like
those in the plaza rises, and a very few houses have a couple of
pillars at their entrances and some outward suggestion of hidden
elegance.

We observe that almost the entire crowd leaving the Agora goes on foot.
 To ride about in a chariot is a sign of undemocratic presumption;
while only women or sick men will consent to be borne in a litter.  We
will select a sprucely dressed gentleman who has just been anointed in
a barber’s shop and accompany him to his home. He is neither one of the
decidedly rich, otherwise his establishment would be exceptional, not
typical, nor is he of course one of the hard-working poor.  Followed by
perhaps two clean and capable serving lads, he wends his way down
several of the narrow lanes that lie under the northern brow of the
Acropolis[*].  Before a plain solid house door he halts and cries,
“_Pai!  Pai!_” [“Boy!  Boy!”]. There is a rattle of bolts and bars.  A
low-visaged foreign-born porter, whose business it is to show a surly
front to all unwelcome visitors, opens and gives a kind of salaam to
his master; while the porter’s huge dog jumps up barking and pawing
joyously.

[*] This would be a properly respectable quarter of the city, but we do
not know of any really “aristocratic residence district” in Athens.


As we enter behind him (carefully advancing with right foot foremost,
for it is bad luck to tread a threshold with the _left_) we notice
above the lintel some such inscription as “Let no evil enter here!” or
“To the Good Genius,” then a few steps through a narrow passage bring
us into the _Aula_, the central court, the indispensable feature of
every typical Greek house.


22.  The Type and use of a Greek House.—All domestic architecture,
later investigators will discover, falls into two great categories—of
the northern house and the southern house.  The northern house begins
with a single large room, “the great hall,” then lesser rooms are added
to it.  It gets its light from windows in the outer walls, and it is
covered by a single steep roof.  The southern (Greek and Oriental)
house is a building inclosing a rectangular court.  The rooms, many or
few, get their light from this court, while they are quite shut off
from the world outside.  All in all, for warm climates this style of
house is far more airy, cool, comfortable than the other.  The wide
open court becomes the living room of the house save in very inclement
weather.

Socrates is reported to have uttered what was probably the average
sensible view about a good house.[*]  The good house, he thought,
should be cool in summer, and warm in winter, convenient for the
accommodation of the family and its possessions.  The central rooms
should therefore be lofty and should open upon the south, yet for
protection in summer there should be good projecting eaves (over the
court) and again the rooms on the northern exposure should be made
lower.  All this is mere sense, but really the average male Athenian
does not care a great deal about his dwelling.  He spends surprisingly
little money beautifying it.  Unless he is sick, he will probably be at
home only for sleeping and eating.  The Agora, the Public Assembly, the
Jury Courts, the Gymnasium, the great religious festivals consume his
entire day.  “I never spend my time indoors,” says Xenophon’s model
Athenian, “my wife is well able to run the household by herself.”[+] 
Such being the case, even wealthy men have very simple establishments,
although it is at length complained (_e.g._ by Demosthenes) that people
are now building more luxurious houses, and are not content with the
plain yet sufficient dwellings of the great age of Pericles.[@]

[*] In Xenophon’s _Memorabilia_, III. 8, §§ 9,10.


[+] Xenophon, “_Economics_,” VII. 3.


[@] Very probably in such outlying Greek cities as Syracuse, Taras
(Tarentum), etc., more elegant houses could be found than any at this
time in Athens.


23.  The Plan of a Greek House.—The plan of a Greek house naturally
varies infinitely according to the size of the land plot, the size of
the owner’s family, his own taste, and wealth.  It will usually be
rectangular, with the narrower side toward the street; but this is not
invariable.  In the larger houses there will be two courts (_aulæ_),
one behind the other, and each with its own circuit of dependent
chambers.  The court first entered will be the _Andronitis_ (the Court
of the Men), and may be even large enough to afford a considerable
promenade for exercise.  Around the whole of the open space run lines
of simple columns, and above the opening swings an awning if the day is
very hot.  In the very center rises a small stone altar with a statue
of Zeus the Protector (_Zeus Herkeïos_), where the father of the family
will from time to time offer sacrifice, acting as the priest for the
household.  Probably already on the altar there has been laid a fresh
garland; if not, the newcomers from the Agora have now fetched one.


[Illustration: Conjectural Plan for the House of A Wealthy Athenian.
A = Altar of Zeus Herkelos.
B = Altar of Hestia.
C = Entrance Hall.
D = Kitchen.
T = Thalmos.
T′ = Anti-thalmos.
X = Rooms for the Men.
Y = Rooms for the Women.]


The Andronitis is the true living room of the house:  here the master
will receive his visitors, here the male slaves will work, and the
women also busy themselves (promptly retiring, however, on the
appearance of masculine strangers).  The decoration is very plain:  the
walls are neatly tinted with some kind of wash; the floor is of simple
plaster, or, in a humbler house, common earth pounded hard.  Under the
colonnade at all four sides open the various chambers, possibly twelve
in all.  They really are cells or compartments rather than rooms, small
and usually lighted only by their doors.  Some are used for storerooms,
some for sleeping closets for the male slaves and for the grown-up sons
of the house, if there are any.  Dark, ill ventilated, and most
scantily furnished, it is no wonder that the average Athenian loves the
Agora better than his chamber.

The front section of the house is now open to us, but it is time to
penetrate farther.  Directly behind the open court is a sizable chamber
forming a passage to the inner house.  This chamber is the _Andron_,
the dining hall and probably the most pretentious room in the house. 
Here the guests will gather for the dinner party, and here in one
corner smokes the family hearth, once the real fire for the whole
household cooking, but now merely a symbol of the domestic worship.  It
is simply a little round altar sacred to Hestia, the hearth goddess,[*]
and on its duly rekindled flame little “meat offerings and drink
offerings” are cast at every meal, humble or elaborate.

[*] Who corresponds to the Roman goddess _Vesta_.


In the rear wall of the Andron facing the Andronitis is a solid door. 
We are privileged guests indeed if we pass it.  Only the father, sons,
or near male kinsmen of the family are allowed to go inside, for it
leads into the _Gynæconitis_, the hall of the women. To thrust oneself
into the Gynæconitis of even a fairly intimate friend is a studied
insult at Athens, and sure to be resented by bodily chastisement,
social ostracism, and a ruinous legal prosecution. The Gynæconitis is
in short the Athenian’s holy of holies.  Their women are forbidden to
participate in so much of public life that their own peculiar world is
especially reserved to them.  To invade this world is not bad breeding;
it is social sacrilege.

In the present house, the home of a well-to-do family, the Gynæconitis
forms a second pillared court with adjacent rooms of substantially the
same size and shape as the Andronitis.  One of the rooms in the very
rear is proclaimed by the clatter of pots and pans and the odor of a
frying turbot to be the kitchen; others are obviously the sleeping
closets of the slave women.  On the side nearest to the front of the
house, but opening itself upon this inner court, is at least one bed
chamber of superior size.  This is the _Thalamos_, the great bedroom of
the master and mistress, and here are kept all the most costly
furnishings and ornaments in the house.  If there are grown-up
unmarried daughters, they have another such bedroom (_anti-thalamos_)
that is much larger than the cells of the slave girls.  Another special
room is set apart for the working of wool, although this chief
occupation of the female part of the household is likely to be carried
on in the open inner court itself, if the weather is fine.  Here,
around a little flower bed, slave girls are probably spinning and
embroidering, young children playing or quarreling, and a tame quail is
hopping about and watching for a crumb.  There are in fact a great many
people in a relatively small space; everything is busy, chattering,
noisy, and confusing to an intruding stranger.


24.  Modifications in the Typical Plan.—These are the essential
features of an Athenian house.  If the establishment is a very
pretentious one, there may be a small garden in the rear carefully
hedged against intruders by a lofty wall.[*]  More probably the small
size of the house lot would force simplifications in the scheme already
stated.  In a house one degree less costly, the Gynæconitis would be
reduced to a mere series of rooms shut off in the rear.  In more simple
houses still there would be no interior section of the house at all. 
The women of the family would be provided for by a staircase rising
from the main hall to a second story, and here a number of upper
chambers would give the needful seclusion.[+]  Of course as one goes
down the social scale, the houses grow simpler and simpler.  Small
shops are set into the street wall at either side of the entrance door,
and on entering one finds himself in a very limited and utterly dingy
court with a few dirty compartments opening thence, which it would be
absurd to dignify by the name of “rooms.”  Again one ceases to wonder
that the male Athenians are not “home folk” and are glad to leave their
houses to the less fortunate women!

[*] Such a luxury would not be common in city houses; land would be too
valuable.


[+] Houses of more than two stories seem to have been unknown in
Athens.  The city lacked the towering rookeries of tenements (_insulæ_)
which were characteristic of Rome; sometimes, however, a house seems to
have been shared between several families.


25.  Rents and House Values.—Most native Athenians own their houses.
Houses indeed can be rented, usually by the foreign traders and
visitors who swam into the city; and at certain busy seasons one can
hire “lodgings” for a brief sojourn.  Rents are not unreasonable, 8% or
8 1/3% of the value of the house being counted a fair annual return. 
But the average citizen is also a householder, because forsooth houses
are very cheap.  The main cost is probably for the land.  The chief
material used in building, sun-dried brick, is very unsubstantial,[*]
and needs frequent repairs, but is not expensive.  Demosthenes the
Orator speaks of a “little house” (doubtless of the kind last
described) worth only seven minæ [about $126.00 (1914) or $2,242.80
(2000)], and this is not the absolute minimum.  A very rich banker has
had one worth 100 minæ [about $1,800.00 (1914) or $32,040.00 (2000)],
and probably this is close to the maximum.  The rent question is not
therefore one of the pressing problems at Athens.

[*] This material was so friable and poor that the Greek burglar was
known as a “Wall-digger.”  It did not pay him to pick a lock; it was
simpler for him to quarry his way through the wall with a pickax.


26.  The Simple yet Elegant Furnishings of an Athenian Home.—These
houses, even owned by the lordly rich, are surprisingly simple in their
furnishings.  The accumulation of heavy furniture, wall decorations,
and bric-a-brac which will characterize the dwellings of a later age,
would be utterly offensive to an Athenian—contradicting all his ideas
of harmony and “moderation.”  The Athenian house lacks of course
bookcases and framed pictures.  It probably too lacks any genuine
closets.  Beds, couches, chairs (usually backless), stools, footstools,
and small portable tables,—these alone seem in evidence.  In place of
bureaus, dressers and cupboards, there are huge chests, heavy and
carved, in which most of the household gear can be locked away.  In
truth, the whole style of Greek household life expresses that
simplicity on which we have already commented.  Oriental carpets are
indeed met with, but they are often used as wall draperies or couch
covers rather than upon the floors.  Greek costume (see p. 43) is so
simple that there is small need for elaborate chests of drawers, and a
line of pegs upon the wall cares for most of the family wardrobe.

All this is true; yet what furniture one finds is fashioned with
commendable grace.  There is a marked absence of heavy and unhealthful
upholstery; but the simple bed (four posts sustaining a springless
cushion stuffed with feathers or wool) has its woodwork adorned with
carving which is a true mean betwixt the too plain and the too ornate;
and the whole bed is given an elegant effect by the magnificently
embroidered scarlet tapestry which overspreads it. The lines of the
legs of the low wooden tables which are used at the dinner parties will
be a lesson (if we have time to study them) upon just proportion and
the value of subtle curves.  Moreover, the different household vessels,
the stone and bronze lamps, the various table dishes, even the common
pottery put to the humblest uses, all have a beauty, a chaste elegance,
a saving touch of deft ornamentation, which transforms them out of
“kitchen ware” into works of art.  Those black water pots covered with
red-clay figures which the serving maids are bearing so carelessly into
the scullery at the screaming summons of the cook will be some day
perchance the pride of a museum, and teach a later age that costly
material and aristocratic uses are not needful to make an article
supremely beautiful.

Of course the well-to-do Athenian is proud to possess certain
“valuables.”  He will have a few silver cups elegantly chased, and at
least one diner’s couch in the _andron_ will be made of rare imported
wood, and be inlaid with gilt or silver.  On festival days the house
will be hung with brilliant and elaborately wrought tapestries which
will suddenly emerge from the great chests.  Also, despite frowns and
criticisms, the custom is growing of decorating one’s walls with
bright-lined frescoes after the manner of the Agora colonnades.  In the
course of a few generations the homes of the wealthier Greeks will come
to resemble those of the Romans, such as a later age has resurrected at
Pompeii.




Chapter V.
The Women of Athens.


27.  How Athenian Marriages are Arranged.—Over this typical Athenian
home reigns the wife of the master.  Public opinion frowns upon
celibacy, and there are relatively few unmarried men in Athens. An
Athenian girl is brought up with the distinct expectation of
matrimony.[*]  Opportunities for a romance almost never will come her
way; but it is the business of her parents to find her a suitable
husband.  If they are kindly people of good breeding, their choice is
not likely to be a very bad one.  If they have difficulties, they can
engage a professional “matchmaker,” a shrewd old woman who, for a fee,
will hunt out an eligible young man.  Marriage is contracted primarily
that there may be legitimate children to keep up the state and to
perpetuate the family.  That the girl should have any will of her own
in the matter is almost never thought of. Very probably she has never
seen “Him,” save when they both were marching in a public religious
procession, or at some rare family gathering (a marriage or a funeral)
when there were outside guests. Besides she will be “given away” when
only about fifteen, and probably has formed no intelligent opinion or
even prejudices on the subject.

[*] The vile custom of exposing unwelcome female babies probably
created a certain preponderance of males in Attica, and made it
relatively easy to marry off a desirable young girl.


If a young man (who will marry at about thirty) is independent in life,
the negotiations will be with him directly.  If he is still dependent
on the paternal allowance, the two sets of parents will usually arrange
matters themselves, and demand only the formal consent of the
prospective bridegroom.  He will probably accept promptly this bride
whom his father has selected; if not, he risks a stormy encounter with
his parents, and will finally capitulate. He has perhaps never seen
“Her,” and can only hope things are for the best; and after all she is
so young that his friends tell him that he can train her to be very
useful and obedient if he will only take pains.  The parents, or,
failing them, the guardians, adjust the dowry—the lump sum which the
bride will bring with her towards the new establishment.[*]  Many
maxims enjoin “marry only your equal in fortune.”  The poor man who
weds an heiress will not be really his own master; the dread of losing
the big dowry will keep him in perpetual bondage to her whims.

[*]The dowry was a great protection to the bride.  If her husband
divorced her (as by law he might), the dowry must be repaid to her
guardians with 18 per cent. interest.


28.  Lack of Sentiment in Marriages.—Sometimes marriages are arranged
in which any sentiment is obviously prohibited.  A father can betroth
his daughter by will to some kinsman, who is to take her over as his
bride when he takes over the property.  A husband can bequeath his wife
to some friend who is likely to treat her and the orphan children with
kindness.  Such affairs occur every day. Do the Athenian women revolt
at these seemingly degrading conditions, wherein they are handed around
like slaves, or even cattle?—According to the tragic poets they do. 
Sophocles (in the _Tereus_) makes them lament,

“We women are nothing;—happy indeed is our childhood, for _then_ we are
thoughtless; but when we attain maidenhood, lo! we are driven away from
our homes, sold as merchandise, and compelled to marry and say ‘All’s
well.’”

Euripides is even more bitter in his _Medea:_—

Surely of creatures that have life and wit,
We women are of all things wretchedest,
Who first must needs, as buys the highest bidder,
Thus buy a husband, and our body’s master.[*]


[*] Way’s translation.


29. Athenian Marriage Rites.—However, thus runs public custom. At about
fifteen the girl must leave her mother’s fostering care and enter the
house of the stranger.  The wedding is, of course, a great ceremony;
and here, if nowhere else, Athenian women can surely prepare, flutter,
and ordain to their heart’s content.  After the somewhat stiff and
formal betrothal before witnesses (necessary to give legal effect to
the marriage), the actual wedding will probably take place,—perhaps in
a few days, perhaps with a longer wait till the favorite marriage month
Gamelion [January].[*]  Then on a lucky night of the full moon the
bride, having, no doubt tearfully, dedicated to Artemis her childish
toys, will be decked in her finest and will come down, all veiled, into
her father’s torchlit aula, swarming now with guests.  Here will be at
last that strange master of her fate, the bridegroom and his best man
(_paranymphos_).  Her father will offer sacrifice (probably a lamb),
and after the sacrifice everybody will feast on the flesh of the
victim; and also share a large flat cake of pounded sesame seeds
roasted and mixed with honey.  As the evening advances the wedding car
will be outside the door.  The mother hands the bride over to the
groom, who leads her to the chariot, and he and the groomsman sit down,
one on either side, while with torches and song the friends go with the
car in jovial procession to the house of the young husband.

[*] This winter month was sacred to Hera, the marriage guardian.


“Ho, Hymen!  Ho, Hymen!  Hymenæous!  Io!”


So rings the refrain of the marriage song; and all the doorways and
street corners are crowded with onlookers to shout fair wishes and
good-natured raillery.

At the groom’s house there is a volley of confetti to greet the happy
pair.  The bride stops before the threshold to eat a quince.[*] There
is another feast,—possibly riotous fun and hard drinking.  At last the
bride is led, still veiled, to the perfumed and flower-hung marriage
chamber.  The doors close behind the married pair.  Their friends sing
a merry rollicking catch outside, the _Epithalamium_. The great day has
ended.  The Athenian girl has experienced the chief transition of her
life.

[*] The symbol of fertility.


30.  The Mental Horizon of Athenian Women.—Despite the suggestions in
the poets, probably the normal Athenian woman is neither degraded nor
miserable.  If she is a girl of good ancestry and the usual bringing
up, she has never expected any other conditions than these.  She knows
that her parents care for her and have tried to secure for her a
husband who will be her guardian and solace when they are gone. 
Xenophon’s ideal young husband, Ischomachus, says he married his wife
at the age of fifteen.[*]  She had been “trained to see and to hear as
little as possible”; but her mother had taught her to have a sound
control of her appetite and of all kinds of self-indulgence, to take
wool and to make a dress of it, and to manage the slave maids in their
spinning tasks.  She was at first desperately afraid of her husband,
and it was some time before he had “tamed” her sufficiently to discuss
their household problems freely.  Then Ischomachus made her join with
him in a prayer to the gods that “he might teach and she might learn
all that could conduce to their joint happiness”; after which they took
admirable counsel together, and her tactful and experienced husband
(probably more than twice her age) trained her into a model housewife.

[*] See Xenophon’s “The Economist,” VII ff.  The more pertinent
passages are quoted in W. S. Davis’s _Readings in Ancient History_,
Vol. I, pp. 265-271.


31.  The Honor paid Womanhood in Athens.—Obviously from a young woman
with a limited intellectual horizon the Athenian gentleman can expect
no mental companionship; but it is impossible that he can live in the
world as a keenly intelligent being, and not come to realize the
enormous value of the “woman spirit” as it affects all things good. 
Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite, above all Pallas-Athena,—city-warder of
Athens,—who are they all but idealizations of that peculiar genius
which wife, mother, and daughter show forth every day in their homes? 
An Athenian never allows his wife to visit the Agora.  She cannot
indeed go outside the house without his express permission, and only
then attended by one or two serving maids; public opinion will likewise
frown upon the man who allowed his wife to appear in public too
freely[*]; nevertheless there are compensations.  Within her home the
Athenian woman is within her kingdom.  Her husband will respect her,
because he will respect himself.  Brutal and harsh he may possibly be,
but that is because he is also brutal and harsh in his outside
dealings. In extreme cases an outraged wife can sue for divorce before
the archon.  And very probably in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred
the Athenian woman is contented with her lot:  partly because she knows
of nothing better; partly because she has nothing concrete whereof to
complain.

[*] Hypereides, the orator, says, “The woman who goes out of her own
home ought to be of such an age that when men meet her, the question is
not ‘Who is her husband?’ but ‘Whose mother is she?’” Pericles, in the
great funeral oration put in his mouth by Thucydides, says that the
best women are those who are talked of for good or ill the very least.


Doubtless it is because an Athenian house is a “little oasis of
domesticity,” tenderly guarded from all insult,—a miniature world whose
joys and sorrows are not to be shared by the outer universe,—that the
Athenian treats the private affairs of his family as something seldom
to be shared, even with an intimate friend.  Of individual women we
hear and see little in Athens, but of _noble womanhood_ a great deal. 
By a hundred tokens, delightful vase paintings, noble monuments, poetic
myths, tribute is paid to the self-mastery, the self-forgetfulness, the
courage, the gentleness “of the wives and mothers who have made Athens
the beacon of Hellas”; and there is one witness better than all the
rest.  Along the “Street of Tombs,” by the gate of the city, runs the
long row of stelæ (funeral monuments), inimitable and chaste memorials
to the beloved dead; and here we meet, many times over, the portrayal
of a sorrow too deep for common lament, the sorrow for the lovely and
gracious figures who have passed into the great Mystery.  Along the
Street of the Tombs the wives and mothers of Athens are honored not
less than the wealthy, the warriors, or the statesmen.


32.  The Sphere of Action of Athenian Women.—Assuredly the Athenian
house mother cannot match her husband in discussing philosophy or
foreign politics, but she has her own home problems and confronts them
well.  A dozen or twenty servants must be kept busy.  From her, all the
young children must get their first education, and the girls probably
everything they are taught until they are married. Even if she does not
meet many men, she will strive valiantly to keep the good opinion of
her husband.  If she has shapely feet and hands (whereupon great stress
is laid in Hellas), she will do her utmost to display them to the
greatest advantage[*]; and she has, naturally, plenty of other vanities
(see § 38).  Her husband has turned over to her the entire management
of the household.  This means that if he is an easy-going man, she soon
understands his home business far better than he does himself, and
really has him quite at her mercy.  Between caring for her husband’s
wants, nursing the sick slaves, acting as arbitress in their inevitable
disputes, keeping a constant watch upon the storeroom, and finally in
attending to the manufacture of nearly all the family clothing, she is
not likely to rust in busy idleness, or sit complaining of her lot.  At
the many great public festivals she is always at least an onlooker and
often she marches proudly in the magnificent processions.  She is
allowed to attend the tragedies in the theater.[+]  Probably, too, the
family will own a country farm, and spend a part of the year thereon. 
Here she will be allowed a delightful freedom of movement, impossible
in the closely built city.  All in all, then, she will complain of too
much enforced activity rather than of too much idleness.

[*] The custom of wearing sandals instead of shoes of course aided the
developing of beautiful feet.


[+] Not the comedies—they were too broad for refined women.  But the
fact that Athenian ladies seem to have been allowed to attend the
tragedies is a tribute to their intellectual capacities.  Only an acute
and intelligent mind can follow Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.


[Illustration: Spinning]


Nevertheless our judgment upon the Athenian women is mainly one of
regret.  Even if not discontented with their lot, they are not
realizing the full possibilities which Providence has placed within the
reach of womanhood, much less the womanhood of the mothers of the
warriors, poets, orators, and other immortals of Athens.  One great
side of civilization which the city of Athens might develop and realize
is left unrealized. _this civilization of Athens is too masculine;_ it
is therefore one sided, and in so far it does not realize that ideal
“Harmony” which is the average Athenian’s boast.




Chapter VI.
Athenian Costume.


33.  The General Nature of Greek Dress.—In every age the important
kingdom of dress has been reserved for the peculiar sovereignty of
woman.  This is true in Athens, though not perhaps to the extent of
later ages.  Still an Athenian lady will take an interest in “purple
and fine linen” far exceeding that of her husband, and where is there a
more fitting place than this in which to answer for an Athenian, the
ever important question “wherewithal shall I be clothed”?

Once again the Athenian climate comes in as a factor, this time in the
problem of wardrobe.  Two general styles of garment have divided the
allegiance of the world,—the clothes that are _put on_ and the clothes
that are _wrapped around_.  The former style, with its jackets,
trousers, and leggings, is not absolutely unknown to the
Athenians,—their old enemies, the Persians, wear these[*]; but such
clumsy, inelegant garments are despised and ridiculed as fit only for
the “Barbarians” who use them.  They are not merely absurdly homely;
they cannot even be thrown off promptly in an emergency, leaving the
glorious human form free to put forth any noble effort.  The Athenians
wear the wrapped style of garments, which are, in final analysis, one
or two large square pieces of cloth flung skillfully around the body
and secured by a few well-placed pins.  This costume is infinitely
adjustable; it can be expanded into flowing draperies or contracted
into an easy working dress by a few artful twitches.  It can be nicely
adjusted to meet the inevitable sense of “beauty” bred in the bone of
every Athenian. True, on the cold days of midwinter the wearers will go
about shivering; but cold days are the exception, warm days the rule,
in genial Attica.[+]

[*] The Persians no doubt learned to use this style of garment during
their life on the cold, windy steppes of Upper Asia, before they won
their empire in the more genial south.


[+] The whole civilization of Athens was, of course, based on a climate
in which artificial heat would be very little needed.  A pot of glowing
charcoal might be used to remove the chill of a room in the very
coldest weather.  Probably an Athenian would have regarded a climate in
which furnace heat was demanded nearly eight months in the year as
wholly unfit for civilized man.


This simplicity of costume has produced certain important results.
There are practically no tailors in Athens, only cloth merchants,
bleachers, and dyers.  Again fashions (at least in the cut of the
garments) seldom change.  A cloak that was made in the days of
Alcibiades (say 420 B.C.) can be worn with perfect propriety to-day
(360 B.C.) if merely it has escaped without severe use or moth holes. 
It may be more usual this year to wear one’s garments a little higher
or a little more trailing than formerly; but _that_ is simply a matter
for a shifting of the pins or of the girdle.

As a result, the Athenian seldom troubles about his “spring” or
“winter” suit.  His simple woolen garments wear a very long time; and
they have often been slowly and laboriously spun and woven by his wife
and her slave girls.  Of course even a poor man will try to have a few
changes of raiment,—something solid and coarse for every day, something
of finer wool and gayer color for public and private festivals.  The
rich man will have a far larger wardrobe, and will pride himself on not
being frequently seen in the same dress; yet even his outfit will seem
very meager to the dandies of a later age.


34.  the Masculine Chiton, Himation, and Chlamya.—The essential
garments of an Athenian man are only two—the _chiton_ and the
_himation_. The chiton may be briefly described as an oblong of woolen
cloth large enough to wrap around the body somewhat closely, from the
neck down to just above the knees.  The side left open is fastened by
fibulæ—elegantly wrought pins perhaps of silver or gold; in the closed
side there is a slit for the arm.  There is a girdle, and, if one
wishes, the skirt of the chiton may be pulled up through it, and
allowed to hang down in front, giving the effect of a blouse. The man
of prompt action, the soldier, traveler, worker, is “well girded,”—his
chiton is drawn high, but the deliberate old gentleman who parades the
Agora, discussing poetry or statecraft, has his chiton falling almost
to a trailing length.  Only occasionally short sleeves were added to
this very simple garment; they are considered effeminate, and are not
esteemed.  If one’s arms get cold, one can protect them by pulling up
the skirt, and wrapping the arms in the blouse thus created.

An Athenian gentleman when he is in the house wears nothing but his
chiton; it is even proper for him to be seen wearing nothing else upon
the streets, but then more usually he will add an outer cloak,—his
_himation_.

The himation is even simpler than the chiton.  It is merely a generous
oblong woolen shawl.  There are innumerable ways of arranging it
according to the impulse of the moment; but usually it has to be worn
without pins, and that involves wrapping it rather tightly around the
body, and keeping one of the hands confined to hold the cloak in place.
 That is no drawback, however, to a genteel wearer. It proclaims to the
world that _he_ does not have to work, wearing his hands for a living;
therefore he can keep them politely idle.[*] The adjustment of the
himation is a work of great art.  A rich man will often have a special
slave whose business it is to arrange the hang and the folds before his
master moves forth in public; and woe to the careless fellow if the
effect fails to display due elegance and dignity!

[*] Workingmen often wore no himation, and had a kind of chiton (an
exömis) which was especially arranged to leave them with free use of
their arms.


There is a third garment sometimes worn by Athenians.  Young men who
wish to appear very active, and genuine travelers, also wear a
_chlamys_, a kind of circular mantle or cape which swings jauntily over
their shoulders, and will give good protection in foul weather.

There are almost no other masculine garments.  No shirts (unless the
chiton be one), no underwear.  In their costume, as in so many things
else, the Athenians exemplify their oft-praised virtue of simplicity.


35.  The Dress of the Women.—The dress of the women is like that of the
men, but differs, of course, in complexity.  They also have a
chiton,[*] which is more elaborately made, especially in the
arrangement of the blouse; and probably there is involved a certain
amount of real _sewing;_[+] not merely of _pinning_.

[*] This robe was sometimes known by the Homeric name of _peplos_.


[+] Probably with almost all Greek garments the main use of the needle
was in the embroidery merely, or in the darning of holes and rents.  It
was by no means an essential in the real manufacture.


Greater care is needed in the adjustment of the “zone” (girdle), and
half sleeves are the rule with women, while full sleeves are not
unknown.  A Greek lady again cannot imitate her husband, and appear in
public in her chiton only.  A himation, deftly adjusted, is absolutely
indispensable whenever she shows herself outside the house.

These feminine garments are all, as a rule, more elaborately
embroidered, more adorned with fringes and tassels, than those of the
men.  In arranging her dress the Athenian lady is not bound by the
rigid precepts of fashion.  Every separate toilette is an opportunity
for a thousand little niceties and coquetries which she understands
exceedingly well.  If there is the least excuse for an expedition
outside the house, her ladyship’s bevy of serving maids will have a
serious time of it.  While their mistress cools herself with a huge
peacock-feather fan, one maid is busy over her hair; a second holds the
round metallic mirror before her; a third stands ready to extend the
jewel box whence she can select finger rings, earrings, gold armlets,
chains for her neck and hair, as well as the indispensable brooches
whereon the stability of the whole costume depends.  When she rises to
have her himation draped around her, the directions she gives reveal
her whole bent and character.  A dignified and modest matron will have
it folded loosely around her entire person, covering both arms and
hands, and even drawing it over her head, leaving eyes and nose barely
visible.  Younger ladies will draw it close around the body so as to
show the fine lines of their waists and shoulders.  And in the summer
heat the himation (for the less prudish) will become a light shawl
floating loose and free over the shoulders, or only a kind of veil
drawn so as to now conceal, now reveal, the face.

Children wear miniature imitations of the dress of their elders. Boys
are taught to toughen their bodies by refraining from thick garments in
cold weather.  In hot weather they can frequently be seen playing about
with very little clothing at all!


36.  Footwear and Head Coverings.—Upon his feet the Athenian frequently
wears nothing.  He goes about his home barefoot; and not seldom he
enjoys the delight of running across the open greensward with his
unsandaled feet pressing the springing ground; but normally when he
walks abroad, he will wear _sandals_, a simple solid pair of open soles
tied to his feet by leather thongs passing between the toes.  For hard
country walking and for hunting there is something like a high leather
boot,[*] though doubtless these are counted uncomfortable for ordinary
wear.  As for the sandals, simple as they are, the Attic touch of
elegance is often upon them.  Upon the thongs of the sandals there is
usually worked a choice pattern, in some brilliant color or even gilt.

[*] Actors, too, wore a leather boot with high soles to give them extra
height—the _cothurnus_.


The Athenians need head coverings even less than footgear.  Most of
them have thick hair; baldness is an uncommon affliction; everybody is
trained to walk under the full glare of Helios with little discomfort. 
Of course certain trades require hats, _e.g._ sailors who can be almost
identified by their rimless felt caps.  Genteel travelers will wear
wide-brimmed hats; but  the ladies, as a rule, have no headgear besides
their tastefully arranged hair, although they will partly atone for the
lack, by having a maid walk just behind them with a gorgeously
variegated parasol.


37.  The Beauty of the Greek Dress.—Greek Costume, then, is something
fully sharing in the national characteristics of harmony, simplicity,
individuality.  It is easy to see how admirably this style of dress is
adapted to furnish over ready models and inspiration for the
sculptor.[*]  Unconventional in its arrangement, it is also
unconventional in its color.  A masculine crowd is not one unmitigated
swarm of black and dark grays or browns, as with the multitude of a
later age.  On the contrary, white is counted as theoretically the most
becoming color on any common occasion for either sex;[+] and on
festival days even grave and elderly men will appear with chitons
worked with brilliant embroidery along the borders, and with splendid
himatia of some single clear hue—violet, red, purple, blue, or yellow. 
As for the costume of the groom at a wedding, it is far indeed from the
“conventional black” of more degenerate days.  He may well wear a
purple-edged white chiton of fine Milesian wool, a brilliant scarlet
himation, sandals with blue thongs and clasps of gold, and a chaplet of
myrtle and violets. His intended bride is led out to him in even more
dazzling array. Her white sandal-thongs are embroidered with emeralds,
rubies, and pearls.  Around her neck is a necklace of gold richly
set,—and she has magnificent golden armlets and pearl eardrops.  Her
hair is fragrant with Oriental nard, and is bound by a purple fillet
and a chaplet of roses.  Her ungloved fingers shine with jewels and
rings.  Her main costume is of a delicate saffron, and over it all,
like a cloud, floats the silvery tissue of the nuptial veil.

[*] “The chiton became the mirror of the body,” said the late writer
Achilles Tatius.


[+] No doubt farmers and artisans either wore garments of a
non-committal brown, or, more probably, let their originally white
costume get utterly dirty.


38.  Greek Toilet Frivolities.—From the standpoint of inherent fitness
and beauty, this Athenian costume is the noblest ever seen by the
world.  Naturally there are ill-advised creatures who do not share the
good taste of their fellows, or who try to deceive the world and
themselves as to the ravages of that arch-enemy of the Hellene,—Old
Age.  Athenian women especially (though the men are not without their
follies) are sometimes fond of rouge, false hair, and the like.  Auburn
hair is especially admired, and many fine dames bleach their tresses in
a caustic wash to obtain it. The styles of feminine hair dressing seem
to change from decade to decade much more than the arrangements of the
garments.  Now it is plaited and crimped hair that is in vogue, now the
more beautiful “Psyche-knots”; yet even in their worst moods the
Athenian women exhibit a sweet reasonableness.  They have not yet
fallen into the clutches of the Parisian hairdresser.

The poets, of course, ridicule the foibles of the fair sex.[*]
Says one:—

The golden hair Nikylla wears
    Is hers, who would have thought it?
She swears ’tis hers, and true she swears
    For I know where she bought it!


And again:—

You give your cheeks a rosy stain,
With washes dye your hair;
But paint and washes both are vain
To give a youthful air.
An art so fruitless then forsake,
Which, though you much excel in,
You never can contrive to make
Old Hecuba young Helen.


[*] Translated in Falke’s _Greece and Rome_ (English translation, p.
69).  These quotations probably date from a time considerably later
than the hypothetical period of this sketch; but they are perfectly
proper to apply to conditions in 360 B.C.


But enough of such scandals!  All the best opinion—masculine and
feminine—frowns on these follies.  Let us think of the simple,
dignified, and æsthetically noble costume of the Athenians as not the
least of their examples to another age.




Chapter VII.
The Slaves.


39.  Slavery an Integral Part of Greek Life.—An Athenian lady cares for
everything in her house,—for the food supplies, for the clothing, yet
probably her greatest task is to manage the heterogeneous multitude of
slaves which swarm in every wealthy or even well-to-do mansion.[*]

[*] The Athenians never had the absurd armies of house slaves which
characterized Imperial Rome; still the numbers of their domestic
servants were, from a modern standpoint, extremely large.


Slaves are everywhere:  not merely are they the domestic servants, but
they are the hands in the factories, they run innumerable little shops,
they unload the ships, they work the mines, they cultivate the farms. 
Possibly there are more able-bodied male slaves in Attica than male
free men, although this point is very uncertain. Their number is the
harder to reckon because they are not required to wear any distinctive
dress, and you cannot tell at a glance whether a man is a mere piece of
property, or a poor but very proud and important member of the
“Sovereign Demos [People] of Athens.”

No prominent Greek thinker seems to contest the righteousness and
desirability of slavery.  It is one of the usual, nay, inevitable,
things pertaining to a civilized state.  Aristotle the philosopher puts
the current view of the case very clearly.  “The lower sort of mankind
are _by nature_ slaves, and it is better for all inferiors that they
should be under the rule of a master.  The use made of slaves and of
tame animals is not very different; for both by their bodies minister
to the needs of life.”  The intelligent, enlightened, progressive
Athenians are naturally the “masters”; the stupid, ignorant, sluggish
minded Barbarians are the “inferiors.”  Is it not a plain decree of
Heaven that the Athenians are made to rule, the Barbarians to serve?—No
one thinks the subject worth serious argument.

Of course the slave cannot be treated quite as one would treat an ox. 
Aristotle takes pains to point out the desirability of holding out to
your “chattel” the hope of freedom, if only to make him work better;
and the great philosopher in his last testament gives freedom to five
of his thirteen slaves.  Then again it is recognized as clearly against
public sentiment to hold fellow Greeks in bondage. It is indeed done. 
Whole towns get taken in war, and those of the inhabitants who are not
slaughtered are sold into slavery.[*] Again, exposed children, whose
parents have repudiated them, get into the hands of speculators, who
raise them “for market.”  There is also a good deal of kidnapping in
the less civilized parts of Greece like Ætolia.  Still the proportion
of genuinely _Greek_ slaves is small.  The great majority of them are
“Barbarians,” men born beyond the pale of Hellenic civilization.

[*] For example, the survivors, after the capture of Melos, in the
Peloponesian War.


40.  The Slave Trade in Greece.—There are two great sources of slave
supply:  the Asia Minor region (Lydia and Phrygia, with Syria in the
background), and the Black Sea region, especially the northern shores,
known as Scythia.  It is known to innumerable heartless “traders” that
human flesh commands a very high price in Athens or other Greek cities.
 Every little war or raid that vexes those barbarous countries so
incessantly is followed by the sale of the unhappy captives to
speculators who ship them on, stage by stage, to Athens.  Perhaps there
is no war; the supply is kept up then by deliberately kidnapping on a
large scale, or by piracy.[*]  In any case the arrival of a chain gang
of fettered wretches at the Peiræus is an everyday sight.  Some of
these creatures are submissive and tame (perhaps they understand some
craft or trade); these can be sold at once for a high price.  Others
are still doltish and stubborn.  They are good for only the rudest kind
of labor, unless they are kept and trained at heavy expense.  These
brutish creatures are frequently sold off to the mines, to be worked to
death by the contractors as promptly and brutally as one wears out a
machine; or else they become public galley slaves, when their fate is
practically the same.  But we need not follow such horrors.

[*] A small but fairly constant supply of slaves would come from the
seizure of the persons and families of bankrupt debtors, whose
creditors, especially in the Orient, might sell them into bondage.


The remainder are likely to be purchased either for use upon the farm,
the factory, or in the home.  There is a regular “circle” at or near
the Agora for traffic in them.  They are often sold at auction.  The
price of course varies with the good looks, age,[*] or dexterity of the
article, or the abundance of supply.  “Slaves will be high” in a year
when there has been little warfare and raiding in Asia Minor.  “Some
slaves,” says Xenophon, “are well worth two minæ [$36.00 (1914) or
$640.80 (2000)] and others barely half a mina [$9.00 (1914) or $160.20
(2000)]; some sell up to five minæ [$90.00 (1914) or $1,602.00 (2000)]
and even for ten [$180.00 (1914) or $3,204.00 (2000)].  Nicias, the son
of Nicaretus, is said to have given a talent [over $1,000.00 (1914) or
$17,800.00 (2000)] for an overseer in the mines.”[+]  The father of
Demosthenes owned a considerable factory.  He had thirty-two sword
cutters worth about five minæ each, and twenty couch-makers (evidently
less skilled) worth together 40 minæ [about $720.00 (1914) or
$12,816.00 (2000)].  A girl who is handsome and a clever flute player,
who will be readily hired for supper parties, may well command a very
high price indeed, say even 30 minæ [about $540.00 (1914) or $9,612.00
(2000)].

[*] There was probably next to no market for old women; old men in
broken health would also be worthless.  Boys and maids that were the
right age for teaching a profitable trade would fetch the most.


[+] Xenophon, _Memorabilia_, ii. 5, § 2.


41.  The Treatment of Slaves in Athens.—Once purchased, what is the
condition of the average slave?  If he is put in a factory, he probably
has to work long hours on meager rations.  He is lodged in a kind of
kennel; his only respite is on the great religious holidays.  He cannot
contract valid marriage or enjoy any of the normal conditions of family
life.  Still his evil state is partially tempered by the fact that he
has to work in constant association with free workmen, and he seems to
be treated with a moderate amount of consideration and good
camaraderie.  On the whole he will have much less to complain of (if he
is honest and industrious) than his successors in Imperial Rome.

In the household, conditions are on the whole better.  Every Athenian
citizen tries to have at least _one_ slave, who, we must grant, may be
a starving drudge of all work.  The average gentleman perhaps counts
ten to twenty as sufficient for his needs.  We know of households of
fifty.  There must usually be a steward, a butler in charge of the
storeroom or cellar, a marketing slave, a porter, a baker, a cook,[*] a
nurse, perhaps several lady’s maids, the indispensable attendant for
the master’s walks (a graceful, well-favored boy, if possible), the
pedagogue for the children, and in really rich families, a groom, and a
mule boy.  It is the business of the mistress to see that all these
creatures are kept busy and reasonably contented.  If a slave is
reconciled to his lot, honest, cheerful, industrious, his condition is
not miserable. Athenian slaves are allowed a surprising amount of
liberty, so most visitors to the city complain.  A slave may be flogged
most cruelly, but he cannot be put to death at the mere whim of his
master.  He cannot enter the gymnasium, or the public assembly; but he
can visit the temples.  As a humble member of the family he has a small
part usually in the family sacrifices.  But in any case he is subject
to one grievous hardship:  when his testimony is required in court he
must be “put to the question” by torture.  On the other hand, if his
master has wronged him intolerably, he can take sanctuary at the Temple
of Theseus, and claim the privilege of being sold to some new owner.  A
slave, too, has still another grievance which may be no less galling
because it is sentimental.  His name (given him arbitrarily perhaps by
his master) is of a peculiar category, which at once brands him as a
bondsman:  Geta, Manes, Dromon, Sosias, Xanthias, Pyrrhias,—such names
would be repudiated as an insult by a citizen.

[*] Who, however, could not be trusted to cook a formal dinner.  For
such purpose an expert must be hired.


42.  Cruel and Kind Masters.—Slavery in Athens, as everywhere else, is
largely dependent upon the character of the master; and most Athenian
masters would not regard crude brutality as consistent with that love
of elegance, harmony, and genteel deliberation which characterizes a
well-born citizen.  There do not lack masters who have the whip
continually in their hands, who add to the raw stripes fetters and
branding, and who make their slaves unceasingly miserable; but such
masters are the exception, and public opinion does not praise them. 
Between the best Athenians and their slaves there is a genial, friendly
relation, and the master will put up with a good deal of real
impertinence, knowing that behind this forwardness there is an honest
zeal for his interests.

Nevertheless the slave system of Athens is not commendable.  It puts a
stigma upon the glory of honest manual labor.  It instills domineering,
despotic habits into the owners, cringing subservience into the owned. 
Even if a slave becomes freed, he does not become an Athenian citizen;
he is only a “metic,” a resident foreigner, and his old master, or some
other Athenian, must be his patron and representative in every kind of
legal business.  It is a notorious fact that the _mere state_ of
slavery robs the victim of his self-respect and manhood.  Nevertheless
nobody dreams of abolishing slavery as an institution, and the
Athenians, comparing themselves with other communities, pride
themselves on the extreme humanity of their slave system.


43.  The “City Slaves” of Athens.—A large number of nominal “slaves” in
Athens differ from any of the creatures we have described.  The
community, no less than an individual, can own slaves just as it can
own warships and temples.  Athens owns “city slaves” (_Demosioi_) of
several varieties.  The clerks in the treasury office, and the checking
officers at the public assemblies are slaves; so too are the less
reputable public executioners and torturers; in the city mint there is
another corps of slave workers, busy coining “Athena’s owls”—the silver
drachmas and four-drachma pieces.  But chiefest of all, _the city owns
its public police force_.  The “Scythians” they are called from their
usual land of origin, or the “bowmen,” from their special weapon, which
incidentally makes a convenient cudgel in a street brawl.  There are
1200 of them, always at the disposal of the city magistrates.  They
patrol the town at night, arrest evil-doers, sustain law and order in
the Agora, and especially enforce decorum, if the public assemblies or
the jury courts become tumultuous.  They have a special cantonment on
the hill of Areopagus near the Acropolis.  “Slaves” they are of course
in name, and under a kind of military discipline; but they are highly
privileged slaves.  The security of the city may depend upon their
loyal zeal. In times of war they are auxiliaries.  Life in this police
force cannot therefore be burdensome, and their position is envied by
all the factory workers and the house servants.




Chapter VIII.
The Children.


44.  The Desirability of Children in Athens.—Besides the oversight of
the slaves the Athenian matron has naturally the care of the children. 
A childless home is one of the greatest of calamities. It means a
solitary old age, and still worse, the dying out of the family and the
worship of the family gods.  There is just enough of the old
superstitious “ancestor worship” left in Athens to make one shudder at
the idea of leaving the “deified ancestor” without any descendants to
keep up the simple sacrifices to their memory. Besides, public opinion
condemns the childless home as not contributing to the perpetuation of
the city.  How Corinth, Thebes, or Sparta will rejoice, if it is plain
that Athens is destroying herself by race suicide!  So at least _one_
son will be very welcome.  His advent is a day of happiness for the
father, of still greater satisfaction for the young mother.


45.  The Exposure of Infants.—How many more children are welcome
depends on circumstances.  Children are expensive luxuries.  They must
be properly educated and even the boys must be left a fair fortune.[*] 
The girls must always have good dowries, or they cannot “marry
according to their station.”  Public opinion, as well as the law,
allows a father (at least if he has one or two children already) to
exercise a privilege, which later ages will pronounce one of the
foulest blots on Greek civilization.  After the birth of a child there
is an anxious day or two for the poor young mother and the faithful
nurses.—Will he ‘nourish’ it?  Are there boys enough already?  Is the
disappointment over the birth of a daughter too keen?  Does he dread
the curtailment in family luxuries necessary to save up for an
allowance or dowry for the little stranger?  Or does the child promise
to be puny, sickly, or even deformed?  If any of these arguments carry
adverse weight, there is no appeal against the father’s decision.  He
has until the fifth day after the birth to decide.  In the interval he
can utter the fatal words, “Expose it!”  The helpless creature is then
put in a rude cradle, or more often merely in a shallow pot and placed
near some public place; _e.g._ the corner of the Agora, or near a
gymnasium, or the entrance to a temple.  Here it will soon die of mere
hunger and neglect unless rescued.  If the reasons for exposure are
evident physical defects, no one will touch it.  Death is certain.  If,
however, it seems healthy and well formed, it is likely to be taken up
and cared for.  Not out of pure compassion, however.  The harpies who
raise slaves and especially slave girls, for no honest purposes, are
prompt to pounce upon any promising looking infant. They will rear it
as a speculation; if it is a girl, they will teach it to sing, dance,
play.  The race of light women in Athens is thus really recruited from
the very best families.  The fact is well known, but it is constantly
winked at.  Aristophanes, the comic poet, speaks of this exposure of
children as a common feature of Athenian life.  Socrates declares his
hearers are vexed when he robs them of pet ideas, “like women who have
had their children taken from them.”  There is little or nothing for
men of a later day to say of this custom save condemnation.[+]

[*] The idea of giving a lad a “schooling” and then turning him loose
to earn his own living in the world was contrary to all Athenian theory
and practice.


[+] About the only boon gained by this foul usage was the fact that,
thanks to it, the number of physically unfit persons in Athens was
probably pretty small, for no one would think of bringing up a child
which, in its first babyhood, promised to be a cripple.


46.  The Celebration of a Birth.—But assuredly in a majority of cases,
the coming of a child is more than welcome.  If a girl, tufts of wool
are hung before the door of the happy home; if a boy, there is set out
an olive branch.  Five days after the birth, the nurse takes the baby,
wrapped almost to suffocation in swaddling bands, to the family hearth
in the _andron_, around which she runs several times, followed
doubtless, in merry, frolicking procession, by most of the rest of the
family.  The child is now under the care of the family gods.  There is
considerable eating and drinking. Exposure now is no longer possible. 
A great load is off the mind of the mother.  But on the “tenth day”
comes the real celebration and the feast.  This is the “name day.”  All
of the kinsmen are present.  The house is full of incense and garlands.
 The cook is in action in the kitchen.  Everybody brings simple gifts,
along with abundant wishes of good luck.  There is a sacrifice, and
during the ensuing feast comes the naming of the child.  Athenian names
are very short and simple.[*]  A boy has often his father’s name, but
more usually his grandfather’s, as, _e.g._, Themistocles, the son of
Neocles, the son of Themistocles:  the father’s name being usually
added in place of a surname.  In this way certain names will become a
kind of family property, and sorrowful is the day when there is no
eligible son to bear them!

The child is now a recognized member of the community.  His father has
accepted him as a legitimate son, one of his prospective heirs,
entitled in due time to all the rights of an Athenian citizen.

[*] Owing to this simplicity and the relatively small number of
Athenian names, a directory of the city would have been a perplexing
affair.


47.  Life and Games of Young Children.—The first seven years of a Greek
boy’s life are spent with his nurses and his mother.  Up to that time
his father takes only unofficial interest in his welfare. Once past the
first perilous “five days,” an Athenian baby has no grounds to complain
of his treatment.  Great pains are taken to keep him warm and well
nourished.  A wealthy family will go to some trouble to get him a
skilful nurse, those from Sparta being in special demand, as knowing
the best how to rear healthy infants. He has all manner of toys, and
Aristotle the philosopher commends their frequent donation; otherwise,
he says, children will be always “breaking things in the house.” 
Babies have rattles.  As they grow older they have dolls of painted
clay or wax, sometimes with movable hands and feet, and also toy
dishes, tables, wagons, and animals.  Lively boys have whipping toys,
balls, hoops, and swings.  There is no lack of pet dogs, nor of all
sorts of games on the blind man’s bluff and “tag” order.[*]  Athenian
children are, as a class, very active and noisy.  Plato speaks
feelingly of their perpetual “roaring.”  As they grow larger, they
begin to escape more and more from the narrow quarters of the courts of
the house, and play in the streets.

[*] It is not always easy to get the exact details of such ancient
games, for the “rules” have seldom come down to us; but generally
speaking, the games of Greek children seem extremely like those of the
twentieth century.


[Illustration: The Maternal Slipper]


48.  Playing in the Streets.—Narrow, dirty, and dusty as the streets
seem, children, even of good families, are allowed to play in them. 
After a rain one can see boys floating toy boats of leather in every
mud puddle, or industriously making mud pies.  In warm weather the
favorite if cruel sport is to catch a beetle, tie a string to its legs,
let it fly off, then twitch it back again. Leapfrog, hide-and-seek,
etc., are in violent progress down every alley.  The streets are not
all ideal playgrounds.  Despite genteel ideas of dignity and
moderation, there is a great deal of foul talk and brawling among the
passers, and Athenian children have receptive eyes and ears.  Yet on
the other hand, there is a notable regard and reverence for childhood. 
With all its frequent callousness and inhumanity, Greek sentiment
abhors any brutality to young children. Herodotus the historian tells
of the falling of a roof, whereby one hundred and twenty school
children perished, as being a frightful calamity,[*] although
recounting cold-blooded massacres of thousands of adults with never a
qualm; and Herodotus is a very good spokesman for average Greek
opinion.

[*] Herodotus, VI. 27.


49.  The First Stories and Lessons.—Athens has no kindergartens. The
first teaching which children will receive is in the form of fables and
goblin tales from their mothers and nurses,—usually with the object of
frightening them into “being good,”—tales of the spectral Lamiæ, or of
the horrid witch Mormo who will catch nasty children; or of Empusa, a
similar creature, who lurks in shadows and dark rooms; or of the
Kabaloi, wild spirits in the woods.  Then come the immortal fables of
Æsop with their obvious application towards right conduct.  Athenian
mothers and teachers have no two theories as to the wisdom of corporeal
punishment.  The rod is never spared to the spoiling of the child,
although during the first years the slipper is sufficient.  Greek
children soon have a healthy fear of their nurses; but they often learn
to love them, and funeral monuments will survive to perpetuate their
grateful memory.


50.  The Training of Athenian Girls.—Until about seven years old
brothers and sisters grow up in the _Gynæconitis_ together.  Then the
boys are sent to school.  The girls will continue about the house until
the time of their marriage.  It is only in the rarest of cases that the
parents feel it needful to hire any kind of tutor for _them_.  What the
average girl knows is simply what her mother can teach her.  Perhaps a
certain number of Athenian women (of good family, too) are downright
illiterate; but this is not very often the case.  A normal girl will
learn to read and write, with her mother for school mistress.[*]  Very
probably she will be taught to dance, and sometimes to play on some
instrument, although this last is not quite a proper accomplishment for
young women of good family.  Hardly any one dreams of giving a woman
any systematic intellectual training.[+]  Much more important it is
that she should know how to weave, spin, embroider, dominate the cook,
and superintend the details of a dinner party.  She will have hardly
time to learn these matters thoroughly before she is “given a husband,”
and her childhood days are forever over (see § 27).

[*] There has come down to us a charming Greek terra-cotta (it is true,
not from Athens) showing a girl seated on her mother’s knee, and
learning from a roll which she holds.


[+] Plato suggested in his _Republic_ (V. 451 f.) that women should
receive the same educational opportunities as the men.  This was a
proposition for Utopia and never struck any answering chord.


Meantime her brother has been started upon a course of education which,
both in what it contains and in what it omits, is one of the most
interesting and significant features of Athenian life.




Chapter IX.
The Schoolboys of Athens.


51.  Athenians Generally Literate.—Education is not compulsory by law
in Athens, but the father who fails to give his son at least a modicum
of education falls under a public contempt, which involves no slight
penalty.  Practically all Athenians are at least literate. In
Aristophanes’s famous comedy, _The Knights_, a boorish “sausage-seller”
is introduced, who, for the purposes of the play, must be one of the
very scum of society, and he is made to cry, “Only consider now my
education!  I can but barely read, just in a kind of way.”[*] 
Evidently if illiterates are not very rare in Athens, the fellow should
have been made out utterly ignorant.  “He can neither swim[+] nor say
his letters,” is a common phrase for describing an absolute idiot. 
When a boy has reached the age of seven, the time for feminine rule is
over; henceforth his floggings, and they will be many, are to come from
firm male hands.

[*] Aristophanes, “Knights”, II. 188-189.


[+] Swimming was an exceedingly common accomplishment among the Greeks,
naturally enough, so much of their life being spent upon or near the
sea.


52.  Character Building the Aim of Athenian Education.—The true
education is of course begun long before the age of seven. _Character
not book-learning, is the main object of Athenian Education_, _i.e._ to
make the boy self-contained, modest, alert, patriotic, a true friend, a
dignified gentleman, able to appreciate and participate in all that is
true, harmonius and beautiful in life.  To that end his body must be
trained, not apart from, but along with his mind. Plato makes his
character Protagoras remark, “As soon as a child understands what is
said to him, the nurse, the mother, the pedagogue, and the father vie
in their efforts to make him good, by showing him in all that he does
that ‘_this_ is right,’ and ‘_that_ is wrong’; ‘this is pretty,’ and
‘that is ugly’; so that he may learn what to follow and what to shun. 
If he obeys willingly—why, excellent. If not, then try by threats and
blows to correct him, as men straighten a warped and crooked sapling.” 
Also after he is fairly in school “the teacher is enjoined to pay more
attention to his morals and conduct than to his progress in reading and
music.”


53.  The Schoolboy’s Pedagogue.—It is a great day for an Athenian boy
when he is given a pedagogue.  This slave (perhaps purchased especially
for the purpose) is not his teacher, but he ought to be more than
ordinarily honest, kindly, and well informed.  His prime business is to
accompany the young master everywhere out-of-doors, especially to the
school and to the gymnasium; to carry his books and writing tablets; to
give informal help upon his lessons; to keep him out of every kind of
mischief; to teach him social good manners; to answer the thousand
questions a healthy boy is sure to ask; and finally, in emergencies, if
the schoolmaster or his father is not at hand, to administer a needful
whipping.  A really capable pedagogue can mean everything to a boy; but
it is asking too much that a purchased slave should be an ideal
companion.[*]  Probably many pedagogues are responsible for their
charges’ idleness or downright depravity.  It is a dubious system at
the best.

[*] No doubt frequently the pedagogue would be an old family servant of
good morals, loyalty, and zeal.  In that case the relation might be
delightful.


The assigning of the pedagogue is simultaneous with the beginning of
school days; and the Athenians are not open to the charge of letting
their children waste their time during possible study hours.  As early
as Solon’s day (about 590 B.C.) a law had to be passed forbidding
schools to open _before_ daybreak, or to be kept open after dusk.  This
was in the interest not of good eyesight, but of good morals. 
Evidently schools had been keeping even longer than through the
daylight.  In any case, at gray dawn every yawning schoolboy is off,
urged on by his pedagogue, and his tasks will continue with very little
interruption through the entire day. It is therefore with reason that
the Athenian lads rejoice in the very numerous religious holidays.


54.  An Athenian School.—Leaving the worthy citizen’s home, where we
have lingered long chatting on many of the topics the house and its
denizens suggest, we will turn again to the streets to seek the school
where one of the young sons of the family has been duly conducted
(possibly, one may say, driven) by his pedagogue.  We have not far to
go.  Athenian schools have to be numerous, because they are small.  To
teach children of the poorer classes it is enough to have a modest room
and a few stools; an unrented shop will answer.  But we will go to a
more pretentious establishment. There is an anteroom by the entrance
way where the pedagogues can sit and doze or exchange gossip while
their respective charges are kept busy in the larger room within.  The
latter place, however, is not particularly commodious.  On the bare
wall hang book-rolls, lyres, drinking vessels, baskets for books, and
perhaps some simple geometric instruments.  The pupils sit on rude, low
benches, each lad with his boxwood tablet covered with wax[*] upon his
lap, and presumably busy, scratching letters with his stylus.  The
master sits on a high chair, surveying the scene.  He cultivates a grim
and awful aspect, for he is under no delusion that “his pupils love
him.”  “He sits aloft,” we are told, “like a juryman, with an
expression of implacable wrath, before which the pupil must tremble and
cringe.”[+]

[*] This wax tablet was practically a slate.  The letters written could
be erased with the blunt upper end of the metallic stylus, and the
whole surface of the tablet could be made smooth again by a judicious
heating.


[+] The quotation is from the late writer Libanius, but it is perfectly
true for classic Athens.


Athenian schoolboys have at least their full share of idleness, as well
as of animal spirits.  There is soon a loud whisper from one corner. 
Instantly the ruling tyrant rises.  “Antiphon!  I have heard you.  Come
forward!”  If Antiphon is wise, he will advance promptly and submit as
cheerfully as possible to a sound caning; if folly possesses him, he
will hesitate.  At a nod from the master two older boys, who serve as
monitors, will seize him with grim chuckles.  He will then be fortunate
if he escapes being tied to a post and flogged until his back is one
mass of welts, and his very life seems in danger.  It will be useless
for him to complain to his parents.  A good schoolmaster is supposed to
flog frequently to earn his pay; if he is sparing with the rod or lash,
he is probably lacking in energy.  Boys will be boys, and there is only
one remedy for juvenile shortcomings.

This diversion, of course, with its attendant howling, interrupts the
course of the school, but presently matters again become normal. The
scholars are so few that probably there is only one teacher, and
instruction is decidedly “individual,” although poetry and singing are
very likely taught “in concert.”


55.  The School Curriculum.—As to the subjects studied, the Athenian
curriculum is well fixed and limited:  letters, music, and gymnastics. 
Every lad must have a certain amount of all of these. They gymnastics
will be taught later in the day by a special teacher at a “wrestling
school.”  The “music” may also be taught separately.  The main effort
with a young boy is surely to teach him to read and write.  And here
must be recalled the relative infrequency of complete books in classic
Athens.[*]  To read public placards, inscriptions of laws, occasional
epistles, commercial documents, etc., is probably, for many Athenians,
reading enough. The great poets he will learn by ear rather than by
eye; and he may go through a long and respected life and never be
compelled to read a really sizable volume from end to end.  So the
teaching of reading is along very simple lines.  It is perhaps
simultaneous with the learning of writing.  The twenty-four letters are
learned by sheer power of memory; then the master sets lines upon the
tablets to be copied.  As soon as possible the boy is put to learning
and writing down passages from the great poets.  Progress in mere
literacy is very rapid.  There is no waste of time on history,
geography, or physical science; and between the concentration on a
singly main subject and the impetus given by the master’s rod the
Athenian schoolboy soon becomes adept with his letters.  Possibly a
little arithmetic is taught him, but only a little.  In later life, if
he does not become a trader or banker, he will not be ashamed to reckon
simple sums upon his fingers or by means of pebbles; although if his
father is ambitious to have him become a philosopher, he may have him
taught something of geometry.

[*] One gets the impression that books—in the sense of complete
volumes—were much rarer in Athens than in Imperial Rome, or in later
Middle Ages up to the actual period of the invention of printing.


Once more we see the total absence of “vocational studies” in this
Athenian education.  The whole effort is to develop a fair, noble,
free, and lofty character, not to earn a living.  To set a boy to study
with an eye to learning some profitable trade is counted illiberal to
the last degree.  It is for this reason that practical arithmetic is
discouraged, yet a little knowledge of the art of outline drawing is
allowed; for though no gentleman intends to train his son to be a great
artist, the study will enable him to appreciate good sculpture and
painting.  Above all the schoolmaster, who, despite his brutal
austerity, ought to be a clear-sighted and inspiring teacher, must lose
no opportunity to instill moral lessons, and develop the best powers of
his charges.  Theoginis, the old poet of Megara, states the case well:—

To rear a child is easy; but to teach
Morals and manners is beyond our reach.
To make the foolish wise, the wicked good,
That science never yet understood.


56. The Study of the Poets.—It is for the developing of the best moral
and mental qualities in the lads that they are compelled to memorize
long passages of the great poets of Hellas.  Theoginis, with his pithy
admonitions cast in semi-proverb form, the worldly wisdom of Hesiod,
and of Phocylides are therefore duly flogged into every Attic
schoolboy.[*]  But the great text-book dwarfing all others, is
Homer,—“the Bible of the Greeks,” as later ages will call it.  Even in
the small school we visit, several of the pupils can repeat five or six
long episodes from both the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, and there is one
older boy present (an extraordinary, but by no means an unprecedented
case) who can repeat _both_ of the long epics word for word.[+] 
Clearly the absence of many books has then its compensations.  The
average Athenian lad has what seems to be a simply marvelous memory.

[*] Phocylides, whose gnomic poetry is now preserved to us only in
scant fragments, was an Ionian, born about 560 B.C.  His verses were in
great acceptance in the schools.


[+] For such an attainment see Xenophon’s _Symposium_, 3:5.


And what an admirable text-book and “second reader” the Homeric poems
are!  What characters to imitate:  the high-minded, passionate, yet
withal loyal and lovable Achilles who would rather fight gloriously
before Troy (though death in the campaign is certain) than live a long
life in ignoble ease at home at Phthia; or Oysseus, the “hero of many
devices,” who endures a thousand ills and surmounts them all; who lets
not even the goddess Calypso seduce him from his love to his “sage
Penelope”; who is ever ready with a clever tale, a plausible lie, and,
when the need comes, a mighty deed of manly valor.  The boys will all
go home to-night with firm resolves to suffer all things rather than
leave a comrade unavenged, as Achilles was tempted to do and nobly
refused, and to fight bravely, four against forty, as Odysseus and his
comrades did, when at the call of duty and honor they cleared the house
of the dastard suitors. True, philosophers like Plato complain:  “Homer
gives to lads very undignified and unworthy ideas of the gods”; and men
of a later age will assert:  “Homer has altogether too little to say
about the cardinal virtues of truthfulness and honesty.”[*]  But making
all allowances the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are still the two grandest
secular text-books the world will ever know.  The lads are definitely
the better for them.

[*] The virtue of unflinching _honesty_ was undoubtedly the thing least
cultivated by the Greek education.  Successful prevarication, _e.g._ in
the case of Odysseus, was put at altogether too high a premium. It is
to be feared that the average Athenian schoolboy was only partially
truthful.  The tale of “George Washington and the cherry tree” would
never have found favor in Athens.  The great Virginian would have been
blamed for failing to concoct a clever lie.


Three years, according to Plato, are needed to learn the rudiments of
reading and writing before the boys are fairly launched upon this study
of the poets.  For several years more they will spend most of their
mornings standing respectfully before their master, while he from his
chair reads to them from the roll of one author or another,—the pupils
repeating the lines, time and again, until they have learned them,
while the master interrupts to explain every nice point in mythology,
in real or alleged history, or a moot question in ethics.


57.  The Greeks do not study Foreign Languages.—As the boys grow older
the scope of their study naturally increases; but in one particular
their curriculum will seem strangely limited. _The study of foreign
languages has no place in a Greek course of study._ That any gentleman
should learn say Persian, or Egyptian (unless he intended to devote
himself to distant travel), seems far more unprofitable than, in a
later age, the study of say Patagonian or Papuan will appear.[*]  Down
at the Peiræus there are a few shipmasters, perhaps, who can talk
Egyptian, Phœnecian, or Babylonish. They need the knowledge for their
trade, but even they will disclaim any cultural value for their
accomplishment.  The euphonious, expressive, marvelously delicate
tongue of Hellas sums up for the Athenian almost all that is valuable
in the world’s intellectual and literary life.  What has the outer, the
“Barbarian,” world to give him?—Nothing, many will say, but some gold
darics which will corrupt his statesmen, and some spices, carpets, and
similar luxuries which good Hellenes can well do without.  The Athenian
lad will never need to crucify the flesh upon Latin, French, and
German, or an equivalent for his own Greek.  Therein perhaps he may be
heavily the loser, save that his own mother tongue is so intricate and
full of subtle possibilities that to learn to make the full use thereof
is truly a matter for lifelong education.

[*] This fact did not prevent the Greeks from having a considerable
respect for the traditions and lore of, _e.g._, the Egyptians, and from
borrowing a good many non-Greek usages and inventions; but all this
could take place without feeling the least necessity for studying
foreign languages.


58.  The Study of “Music.”—But the Athenian has a substitute for this
omission of foreign language study: _Music_.  This is something more
comprehensive than “the art of combining tones in a manner to please
the ear” [Webster].  It is practically the study of whatever will
develop the noble powers of the emotions, as contrasted to the mere
intellect.[*]  Indeed everything which comes within the ample provinces
of the nine Muses, even sober history, might be included in the term. 
However, for special purposes, the study of “Music” may be considered
as centering around playing instruments and singing.  The teacher very
likely resides in a house apart from the master of the school of
letters.  Aristophanes gives this picture of the good old customs for
the teaching of music.  “The boys from the same section of the town
have to march thinly clad and draw up in good order—though the snow be
thick as meal—to the house of the harp master.  There he will teach
them [some famous tune] raising a mighty melody.  If any one acts silly
or turns any quavers, he gets a good hard thrashing for ‘banishing the
Muses!’”[+]

[*] Aristotle [_Politics_, V. (or VIII.) 1] says that the literary
education is to train the mind; while music, though of no practical
use, “provides a noble and liberal employment of leisure.”


[+] Aristophanes’s _The Clouds_.  The whole passage is cited in Davis’s
_Readings in Ancient History_, vol. I, pp. 252-255.


Learning to sing is probably the most important item, for every boy and
man ought to be able to bear his part in the great chorals which are a
notable element in most religious festivals; besides, a knowledge of
singing is a great aid to appreciating lyric poetry, or the choruses in
tragedy, and in learning to declaim.  To learn to sing elaborate solo
pieces is seldom necessary,—it is not quite genteel in grown-up
persons, for it savors a little too much of the professional.  So it is
also with instrumental music.  The Greeks lack the piano, the organ,
the elaborate brass instruments of a later day.  Their flutes and
harps, although very sweet, might seem thin to a twentieth-century
critic.  But one can gain considerable volume by the great _number_ of
instruments, and nearly everybody in Athens can pick at the lyre after
a fashion.  The common type of harp is the lyre, and it has enough
possibilities for the average boy. The more elaborate _cithera_ is
usually reserved for professionals.[*] An Athenian lad is expected to
be able to accompany his song upon his own lyre and to play in concert
with his fellows.

[*] For the details of these harp types of instruments see Dictionary
of Antiquities.


The other instrument in common use is the _flute_.  At its simplest,
this is a mere shepherd’s pipe.  Anybody can make one with a knife and
some rushes.  Then come elaborations; two pipes are fitted together
into one wooden mouthpiece.  Now, we really have an instrument with
possibilities.  But it is not in such favor in the schools as the lyre.
 You cannot blow day after day upon the flute and not distort your
cheeks permanently.  Again the gentleman’s son will avoid
“professionalism.”  There are amateur flute players moving in the best
society, but the more fastidious frown upon the instrument, save for
hired performers.


59.  The Moral Character of Greek Music.—Whether it is singing, harp
playing, or flute playing, a most careful watch is kept upon the
_character_ of the music taught the lads.  The master who lets his
pupils learn many soft, dulcet, languishing airs will find his charges’
parents extremely angry, even to depriving him of their patronage. 
Very soft music, in “Lydian modes,” is counted effeminate, fit only for
the women’s quarters and likely to do boys no good. The riotous type
also, of the “Ionic mode,” is fit only for drinking songs and is even
more under the ban.[*]  What is especially in favor is the stern,
strenuous Dorian mode.  This will make boys hardy, manly, and brave. 
Very elaborate music with trills and quavers is in any case frowned
upon.  It simply delights the trained ear, and has no reaction upon the
character; and of what value is a musical presentation unless it leaves
the hearers and performer better, worthier men?  Let the average
Athenian possess the opportunity, and he will infallibly stamp with
disapproval a great part of both the popular and the classical music of
the later ages.[+]

[*] The “Phrygian mode” from which the “Ionic” was derived was still
more demoralizing; it was counted “orgiastic,” and proper only in
certain excited religious rhapsodies.


[+] We have extremely few Greek melodies preserved to us and these few
are not attractive to the modern ear.  All that can fairly be said is
that the Hellenes were obvious such æsthetic, harmoniously minded
people that it is impossible their music should have failed in
nobility, beauty, and true melody.


60.  The Teaching of Gymnastics.—The visits to the reading school and
to the harp master have consumed a large part of the day; but towards
afternoon the pedagogues will conduct their charges to the third of the
schoolboys’ tyrants:  the gymnastic teacher.  Nor do his parents count
this the least important of the three.  Must not their sons be as
physically “beautiful” (to use the common phrase in Athens) as
possible, and must they not some day, as good citizens, play their
brave part in war?  The _palæstras_ (literally “wrestling grounds”) are
near the outskirts of the city, where land is cheap and a good-sized
open space can be secured.  Here the lads are given careful instruction
under the constant eye of an expert in running, wrestling, boxing,
jumping, discus hurling, and javelin casting.  They are not expected to
become professional athletes, but their parents will be vexed if they
do not develop a healthy tan all over their naked bodies,[*] and if
they do not learn at least moderate proficiency in the sports and a
certain amount of familiarity with elementary military maneuvers.  Of
course boys of marked physical ability will be encouraged to think of
training for the various great “games” which culminate at Olympia,
although enlightened opinion is against the promoting of professional
athletics; and certain extreme philosophers question the wisdom of any
extensive physical culture at all, “for (say they) is not the human
mind the real thing worth developing?”[+]

[*] To have a pale, untanned skin was “womanish” and unworthy of a free
Athenian citizen.


[+] The details of the boys’ athletic games, being much of a kind with
those followed by adults at the regular public gymnasia, are here
omitted.  See Chap. XVII.


Weary at length and ready for a hearty meal and sleep, the boys are
conducted homeward by their pedagogues.

As they grow older the lads with ambitious parents will be given a more
varied education.  Some will be put under such teachers of the new
rhetoric and oratory, now in vogue, as the famous Isocrates, and be
taught to play the orator as an aid to inducing their fellow citizens
to bestow political advancement.  Certain will be allowed to become
pupils of Plato, who has been teaching his philosophy out at the groves
of the Academy, or to join some of his rivals in theoretical wisdom. 
Into these fields, however, we cannot follow them.


61.  The Habits and Ambitions of Schoolboys.—It is a clear fact, that
by the age say of thirteen, the Athenian education has had a marked
effect upon the average schoolboy.  Instead of being “the most
ferocious of animals,” as Plato, speaking of his untutored state
describes him, he is now “the most amiable and divine of living
beings.”  The well-trained lad goes now to school with his eyes cast
upon the ground, his hands and arms wrapped in his chiton, making way
dutifully for all his elders.  If he is addressed by an older man, he
stands modestly, looking downward and blushing in a manner worthy of a
girl.  He has been taught to avoid the Agora, and if he must pass it,
never to linger.  The world is full of evil and ugly things, but he is
taught to hear and see as little of them as possible.  When men talk of
his healthy color, increasing beauty, and admire the graceful curves of
his form at the wrestling school, he must not grow proud.  He is being
taught to learn relatively little from books, but a great deal from
hearing the conversation of grave and well-informed men.  As he grows
older his father will take him to all kinds of public gatherings and
teach him the working details of the “Democratic Government” of Athens.
 He becomes intensely proud of his city.  It is at length his chief
thought, almost his entire life.  A very large part of the loyalty
which an educated man of a later age will divide between his home, his
church, his college, his town, and his nation, the Athenian lad will
sum up in two words,—“my _polis_”; _i.e._ the city of Athens. His home
is largely a place for eating and sleeping; his school is not a great
institution, it is simply a kind of disagreeable though necessary
learning shop; his church is the religion of his ancestors, and this
religion is warp and woof of the government, as much a part thereof as
the law courts or the fighting fleet; his town and his nation are alike
the sovran city-state of Athens. Whether he feels keenly a wider
loyalty to Hellas at large, as against the Great King of Persia, for
instance, will depend upon circumstances.  In a real crisis, as at
Salamis,—yes.  In ordinary circumstances when there is a hot feud with
Sparta,—no.


62.  The “Ephebi.”—The Athenian education then is admirably adapted to
make the average lad a useful and worthy citizen, and to make him
modest, alert, robust, manly, and a just lover of the beautiful, both
in conduct and in art.  It does not, however, develop his individual
bent very strongly; and it certainly gives him a mean view of the
dignity of labor.  He will either become a leisurely gentleman, whose
only proper self-expression will come in warfare, politics, or
philosophy; or—if he be poor—he will at least envy and try to imitate
the leisure class.

By eighteen the young Athenian’s days of study will usually come to a
close.  At that age he will be given a simple festival by his father
and be formally enrolled in his paternal _deme_.[*]  His hair, which
has hitherto grown down toward his shoulders, will be clipped short. 
He will allow his beard to grow.  At the temple of Aglaurus he will
(with the other youths of his age) take solemn oath of loyalty to
Athens and her laws.  For the next year he will serve as a military
guard at the Peiræus, and receive a certain training in soldiering. 
The next year the state will present him with a new shield and spear,
and he will have a taste of the rougher garrison duty at one of the
frontier forts towards Bœtia or Megara.[+]  Then he is mustered out. 
He is an ephebus no longer, but a full-fledged citizen, and all the
vicissitudes of Athenian life are before him.

[*] One of the hundred or more petty townships or precincts into which
Attica was divided.


[+] These two years which the _ephebi_ of Athens had to serve under
arms have been aptly likened to the military service now required of
young men in European countries.




Chapter X.
The Physicians of Athens.


63.  The Beginnings of Greek Medical Science.—As we move about the city
we cannot but be impressed by the high average of fine physiques and
handsome faces.  Your typical Greek is fair in color and has very
regular features.  The youths do not mature rapidly, but thanks to the
gymnasia and the regular lives, they develop not merely admirable, but
healthy, bodies.  The proportion of hale and hearty _old_ men is great;
and probably the number of invalids is considerably smaller than in
later times and in more artificially reared communities.[*] 
Nevertheless, the Athenians are certainly mortal, and subject to bodily
ills, and the physician is no unimportant member of society, although
his exact status is much less clearly determined than it will be in
subsequent ages.

[*] A slight but significant witness to the general healthiness of the
Greeks is found in the very rare mention in their literature of such a
common ill as _toothache_.


Greek medicine and surgery, as it appears in Homer, is simply a certain
amount of practical knowledge gained by rough experience, largely
supplemented by primitive superstition.  It was quite as important to
know the proper prayers and charms wherewith to approach “Apollo the
Healer,” as to understand the kind of herb poultice which would keep
wounds from festering.  Homer speaks of Asclepius; however, in early
days he was not a god, but simply a skilful leach. Then as we approach
historic times the physician’s art becomes more regular.  Asclepius is
elevated into a separate and important deity, although it is not till
420 B.C. that his worship is formally introduced into Athens.  Long ere
that time, however, medicine and surgery had won a real place among the
practical sciences.  The sick man stands at least a tolerable chance of
rational treatment, and of not being murdered by wizards and fanatical
exorcists.


64.  Healing Shrines and their Methods.—There exist in Athens and in
other Greek cities real sanataria[*]; these are temples devoted to the
healing gods (usually Asclepius, but sometimes Apollo, Aphrodite, and
Hera).  Here the patient is expected to sleep over night in the temple,
and the god visits him in a dream, and reveals a course of treatment
which will lead to recovery.  Probably there is a good deal of sham and
imposture about the process.  The canny priests know more than they
care to tell about how the patient is worked into an excitable,
imaginative state; and of the very human means employed to produce a
satisfactory and informing dream.[+] Nevertheless it is a great deal to
convince the patient that he is sure of recovery, and that nobody less
than a god has dictated the remedies.  The value of mental therapeutics
is keenly appreciated. Attached to the temple are skilled physicians to
“interpret” the dream, and opportunities for prolonged residence with
treatment by baths, purgation, dieting, mineral waters, sea baths, all
kinds of mild gymnastics, etc.  Entering upon one of these temple
treatments is, in short anything but surrendering oneself to
unmitigated quackery. Probably a large proportion of the former
patients have recovered; and they have testified their gratitude by
hanging around the shrine little votive tablets,[$] usually pictures of
the diseased parts now happily healed, or, for internal maladies, a
written statement of the nature of the disease.  This is naturally very
encouraging to later patients:  they gain confidence knowing that many
cases similar to their own have been thus cured.

[*] The most famous was at Epidaurus, where the Asclepius cult seems to
have been especially localized.


[+] The “healing sleep” employed at these temples is described, in a
kind of blasphemous parody, in Aristophanes’s _Plutus_. (Significant
passages are quoted in Davis’s _Readings in Ancient History_, vol. I,
pp. 258-261.)


[$] Somewhat as in the various Catholic pilgrimage shrines (_e.g._
Lourdes) to-day.


These visits to the healing temples are, however, expensive:  not
everybody has entire faith in them; for many lesser ills also they are
wholly unnecessary.  Let us look, then, at the regular physicians.


65.  An Athenian Physician’s Office.—There are salaried public medical
officers in Athens, and something like a public dispensary where free
treatment is given citizens in simple cases; but the average man seems
to prefer his own doctor.[*]  We may enter the office of Menon, a
“regular private practitioner,” and look about us.  The office itself
is a mere open shop in the front of a house near the Agora; and, like a
barber’s shop is something of a general lounging place.  In the rear
one or two young disciples (doctors in embryo) and a couple of slaves
are pounding up drugs in mortars. There are numbers of bags of dried
herbs and little glass flasks hanging on the walls.  Near the entrance
is a statue of Asclepius the Healer, and also of the great human
founder of the real medical science among the Greeks—Hippocrates.

[*] We know comparatively little of these public physicians; probably
they were mainly concerned with the health of the army and naval force,
the prevention of epidemics, etc.


Menon himself is just preparing to go out on his professional calls. 
He is a handsome man in the prime of his life, and takes great pains
with his personal appearance.  His himation is carefully draped.  His
finger rings have excellent cameos.  His beard has been neatly trimmed,
and he has just bathed and scented himself with delicate Assyrian nard.
 He will gladly tell you that he is in no wise a fop, but that it is
absolutely necessary to produce a pleasant personal impression upon his
fastidious, irritable patients.  Menon himself claims to have been a
personal pupil of the great Hippocrates,[*] and about every other
reputable Greek physician will make the same claim.  He has studied
more or less in a temple of Asclepius, and perhaps has been a member of
the medical staff thereto attached.  He has also become a member of the
Hippocratic brotherhood, a semi-secret organization, associated with
the Asclepius cult, and cheerfully cherishing the dignity of the
profession and the secret arts of the guild.

[*] Who was still alive, an extremely old man.  He died in Thessaly in
357 B.C., at an alleged age of 104 years.


66.  The Physician’s Oath.—The oath which all this brotherhood has
sworn is noble and notable.  Here are some of the main provisions:—

“I swear by Apollo the Physician, and Asclepius and Hygeia; a [Lady
Health] and Panaceia [Lady All-Cure] to honor as my parents the master
who taught me this art, and to admit to my own instruction only his
sons, my own sons, and those who have been duly inscribed as pupils,
and who have taken the medical oath, and no others.  I will prescribe
such treatment as may be for the benefit of my patients, according to
my best power and judgment, and preserve them from anything hurtful or
mischievous.  I will never, even if asked, administer poison, nor
advise its use.  I will never give a criminal draught to a woman.  I
will maintain the purity and integrity of my art.  Wherever I go, I
will abstain from all mischief or corruption, or any immodest action. 
If ever I hear any secret I will not divulge it.  If I keep this oath,
may the gods give me success in life and in my art.  If I break this
oath, may all the reverse fall upon me.”[*]

[*] For the unabridged translation of this oath, see Smith’s
_Dictionary of Antiquities_ (revised edition), vol. II, p. 154.


67.  The Skill of Greek Physicians.—Menon’s skill as a physician and
surgeon is considerable.  True, he has only a very insufficient
conception of anatomy.  His _theoretical_ knowledge is warped, but he
is a shrewd judge of human nature and his _practical_ knowledge is not
contemptible.  In his private pharmacy his assistants have compounded a
great quantity of drugs which he knows how to administer with much
discernment.  He has had considerable experience in dealing with wounds
and sprains, such as are common in the wars or in the athletic games. 
He understands that Dame Nature is a great healer, who is to be
assisted rather than coerced; and he dislikes resorting to violent
remedies, such as bleedings and strong emetics.  Ordinary fevers and
the like he can attack with success.  He has no modern anæsthetics or
opium, but has a very insufficient substitute in mandragora.  He can
treat simple diseases of the eye; and he knows how to put gold filling
into teeth.  His surgical instruments, however, are altogether too
primitive.  He is personally cleanly; but he has not the least idea of
antiseptics; the result is that obscure internal diseases, calling for
grave operations, are likely to baffle him.  He will refuse to operate,
or if he does operate the chances are against the patient.[*]  In other
words, his medical skill is far in advance of his surgery.

[*] Seemingly a really serious operation was usually turned over by the
local physician to a traveling surgeon, who could promptly disappear
from the neighborhood if things went badly.


Menon naturally busies himself among the best families of Athens, and
commands a very good income.  He counts it part of his equipment to be
able to persuade his patients, by all the rules of logic and rhetoric,
to submit to disagreeable treatment; and for that end has taken lessons
in informal oratory from Isocrates or one of his associates.  Some of
Menon’s competitors (feeling themselves less eloquent) have actually a
paid rhetorician whom they can take to the bedside of a stubborn
invalid, to induce him by irrefutable arguments to endure an
amputation.[*]

[*] Plato tells how Gorgias, the famous rhetorician, was sometimes thus
hired.  A truly Greek artifice—this substitution of oratory for
chloroform!


No such honor of course is paid to the intellects of the poorer fry,
who swarm in at Menon’s surgery.  Those who cannot pay to have him
bandage them himself, perforce put up with the secondary skill and
wisdom of the “disciples.”  The drug-mixing slaves are expected to
salve and physic the patients of their own class; but there seems to be
a law against allowing them to attempt the treatment of free-born men.


68.  Quacks and Charlatans.—Unluckily not everybody is wise enough to
put up with the presumably honest efforts of Menon’s underlings. There
appears to be no law against anybody who wishes to pose as a physician,
and to sell his inexperience and his quack nostrums. Vendors of every
sort of cure-all abound, as well as creatures who work on the
superstitions and pretend to cure by charms and hocus-pocus. In the
market there is such a swarm of these charlatans of healing that they
bring the whole medical profession into contempt.  Certain people go so
far as to distrust the efficacy of any part of the lore of Asclepius. 
Says one poet tartly:—

The surgeon Menedemos, as men say,
    Touched as he passed a Zeus of marble white;
    Neither the marble nor his Zeus-ship might
Avail the god—they buried him to-day.


And again even to dream of the quacks is dangerous:—

Diophantes, sleeping, saw
    Hermas the physician:
Diophantes never woke
    From that fatal vision.[*]


[*] Both of these quotations probably date from later than 360 B.C.,
but they are perfectly in keeping with the general opinion of Greek
quackery.


All in all, despite Menon’s good intentions and not despicable skill,
it is fortunate the gods have made “Good Health” one of their commonest
gifts to the Athenians.  Constant exercise in the gymnasia, occasional
service in the army, the absence of cramping and unhealthful office
work, and a climate which puts out-of-door existence at a premium,
secure for them a general good health that compensates for most of the
lack of a scientific medicine.




Chapter XI.
The Funerals.


69.  An Athenian’s Will.—All Menon’s patient’s are to-day set out upon
the road to recovery.  Hipponax, his rival, has been less fortunate.  A
wealthy and elderly patient, Lycophron, died the day before yesterday. 
As the latter felt his end approaching, he did what most Athenians may
put off until close to the inevitable hour—he made his will, and called
in his friends to witness it; and one must hope there can be no doubt
about the validity, the signets attached, etc., for otherwise the heirs
may find themselves in a pretty lawsuit.

The will begins in this fashion:  “The Testament of Lyophron the
Marathonian.[*]  May all be well:—but if I do not recover from this
sickness, thus do I bestow my estate.”  Then in perfectly cold-blooded
fashion he proceeds to give his young wife and the guardianship of his
infant daughter to Stobiades, a bachelor friend who will probably marry
the widow within two months or less of the funeral.  Lycophron gives
also specific directions about his tomb; he gives legacies of money or
jewelry to various old associates; he mentions certain favorite slaves
to receive freedom, and as specifically orders certain others (victims
of his displeasure) to be kept in bondage.  Lastly three reliable
friends are names as executors.

[*] In all Athenian legal documents, it was necessary to give the deme
of the interested party or parties.


70.  The Preliminaries of a Funeral.—An elaborate funeral is the last
perquisite of every Athenian.  Even if Lycophron had been a poor man he
would now receive obsequies seemingly far out of proportion to his
estate and income.  It is even usual in Greek states to have laws
restraining the amount which may be spent upon funerals,—otherwise
great sums may be literally “burned up” upon the funeral pyres. When
now the tidings go out that Lycophron’s nearest relative has “closed
his mouth,” after he has breathed his last, all his male kinsfolk and
all other persons who _hope_ to be remembered in the will promptly
appear in the Agora in black himatia[*] and hasten to the barber shops
to have their heads shaved.  The widow might shave her hair likewise,
with all her slave maids, did not her husband, just ere his death,
positively forbid such disfigurements. The women of the family take the
body in charge the minute the physician has declared that all is over. 
The customary obol is put in the mouth of the corpse,[+] and the body
is carefully washed in perfumed water, clothed in festal white; then
woolen fillets are wound around the head, and over these a crown of
vine leaves.  So arrayed, the body is ready to be laid out on a couch
in the front courtyard of the house, with the face turned toward the
door so as to seem to greet everybody who enters.  In front of the
house there stands a tall earthen vase of water, wherewith the visitors
may give themselves a purifying sprinkling, after quitting the
polluting presence of a dead body.

[*] In the important city of Argos, however, _white_ was the proper
funeral color.


[+] This was not originally (as later asserted) a fee to Charon the
ferryman to Hades, but simply a “minimum precautionary sum, for the
dead man’s use” (Dr. Jane Harrison), placed in the mouth, where a Greek
usually kept his small change.


71.  Lamenting of the Dead.—Around this funeral bed the relatives and
friends keep a gloomy vigil.  The Athenians after all are southern
born, and when excited seem highly emotional people.  There are stern
laws dating from Solon’s day against the worst excesses, but what now
occurs seems violent enough.  The widow is beating her breast, tearing
her hair, gashing her cheeks with her finger nails.  Lycophron’s
elderly sister has ashes sprinkled upon her gray head and ever and anon
utters piteous wails.  The slave women in the background keep up a
hideous moaning.  The men present do not think it undignified to utter
loud lamentation and to shed frequent tears.  Least commendable of all
(from a modern standpoint) are the hired dirge singers, who maintain a
most melancholy chant, all the time beating their breasts, and giving a
perfect imitation of frantic grief.  This has probably continued day
and night, the mourners perhaps taking turns by relays.

All in all it is well that Greek custom enjoins the actual funeral, at
least, on the second day following the death.[*]  The “shade” of the
deceased is not supposed to find rest in the nether world until after
the proper obsequies.[+]  To let a corpse lie several days without
final disposition will bring down on any family severe reproach.  In
fact, on few points are the Greeks more sensitive than on this subject
of prompt burial or cremation.  After a land battle the victors are
bound never to push their vengeance so far as to refuse a “burial
truce” to the vanquished; and it is a doubly unlucky admiral who lets
his crews get drowned in a sea fight, without due effort to recover the
corpses afterward and to give them proper disposition on land.

[*] It must be remembered that the Greeks had no skilled embalmers at
their service, and that they lived in a decidedly warm climate.


[+] See the well-known case of the wandering shade of Patroclus
demanding the proper obsequies from Achilles (_Iliad_, XXIII. 71).


72.  The Funeral Procession.—The day after the “laying-out” comes the
actual funeral.  Normally it is held as early as possible in the
morning, before the rising of the sun.  Perhaps while on the way to the
Agora we have passed, well outside the city, such a mournful
procession.  The youngest and stoutest of the male relatives carry the
litter:  although if Lycophron’s relatives had desired a really
extravagant display they might have employed a mule car. Ahead of the
bier march the screaming flute players, earning their fees by no
melodious din.  Then comes the litter itself with the corpse arrayed
magnificently for the finalities, a honey cake set in the hands,[*] a
flask of oil placed under the head.  After this come streaming the
relatives in irregular procession:  the widow and the chief heir (her
prospective second husband!) walking closest, and trying to appear as
demonstrative as possible:  nor (merely because the company is noisy
and not stoical in its manner) need we deny that there is abundant
genuine grief.  All sorts of male acquaintances of the deceased bring
up the rear, since it is good form to proclaim to wide Athens that
Lycophon had hosts of friends.[+]

[*] The original idea of the honey cake was simply that it was a
friendly present to the infernal gods; later came the conceit that it
was a sop to fling to the dog Cerberus, who guarded the entrance to
Hades.


[+] Women, unless they were over sixty years of age, were not allowed
to join in funeral processions unless they were first cousins, or
closer kin, of the deceased.


73.  The Funeral Pyre.—So the procession moves through the still gloomy
streets of the city,—doubtless needing torch bearers as well as flute
players,—and out through some gate, until the line halts in an open
field, or better, in a quiet and convenient garden. Here the great
funeral pyre of choice dry fagots, intermixed with aromatic cedar, has
been heaped.  The bier is laid thereon.  There are no strictly
religious ceremonies.  The company stands in a respectful circle, while
the nearest male kinsman tosses a pine link upon the oil-soaked wood. 
A mighty blaze leaps up to heaven, sending its ruddy brightness against
the sky now palely flushed with the bursting dawn.  The flutists play
in softer measures.  As the fire rages a few of the relatives toss upon
it pots of rare unguents; and while the flames die down, thrice the
company shout their farewells, calling their departed friend by
name—“Lycophron! Lycophron!  Lycophron!”

So fierce is the flame it soon sinks into ashes.  As soon as these are
cool enough for safety (a process hastened by pouring on water or wine)
the charred bones of the deceased are tenderly gathered up to be placed
in a stately urn.  The company, less formally now, returns to Athens,
and that night there will probably be a great funeral feast at the
house of the nearest relative, everybody eating and drinking to
capacity “to do Lycophron full honor”; for it is he who is imagined as
being now for the last time the host.


74.  Honors to the memory of the Dead.—Religion seems to have very
little place in the Athenian funeral:  there are no priests present, no
prayers, no religious hymns.  But the dead man is now conceived as
being, in a very humble and intangible way, a deity himself:  his good
will is worth propitiating; his memory is not to be forgotten.  On the
third, ninth, and thirtieth days after the funeral there are simple
religious ceremonies with offerings of garlands, fruits, libations and
the like, at the new tomb; and later at certain times in the year these
will be repeated.  The more enlightened will of course consider these
merely graceful remembrances of a former friend; but there is a good
deal of primitive ancestor worship even in civilized Athens.

_Burning_ is the usual method for the Greeks to dispose of their dead,
but the burial of unburned bodies is not unknown to them. Probably,
however, the rocky soil and the limited land space around Athens make
regular cemeteries less convenient than elsewhere:  still it would have
been nothing exceptional if Lycophron had ordered in his will that he
be put in a handsome pottery coffin to be placed in a burial ground
pertaining to his family.


[Illustration: ATHENIAN FUNERAL MONUMENT
A lady is gazing upon her casket of jewels before bidding them eternal
farewell. Note the admirable restraint yet pathos of the scene.]


75.  The Beautiful Funeral Monuments.—If the noisy funeral customs
permitted to the Athenians may repel a later day observer, there can be
only praise for the Athenian tombs, or rather the funeral monuments
(_stëlæ_) which might be set over the urns or ashes or the actual
coffins.  Nearly every Athenian family has a private field which it
uses for sepulchral purposes:  but running outside of the city, near
the Itonian Gate along the road to the Peiræus, the space to either
side of the highway has been especially appropriated for this purpose.
Walking hither along this “Street of the Tombs” we can make a careful
survey of some of the most touching memorials of Athenian life.

The period of hot, violent grief seems now over; the mourners have
settled down in their dumb sense of loss.  This spirit of calm, noble
resignation is what is expressed upon these monuments.  All is chaste,
dignified, simple.  There are no labored eulogies of the deceased; no
frantic expressions of sorrow; no hint (let it be also said) of any
hope of reunions in the Hereafter.  Sometimes there is simply a plain
marble slab or pillar marked with the name of the deceased; and with
even the more elaborate monuments the effort often is to concentrate,
into one simple scene, the best and worthiest that was connected with
the dear departed.  Here is the noble mother seated in quiet dignity
extending her hand in farewell to her sad but steadfast husband, while
her children linger wonderingly by; here is the athlete, the young man
in his pride, depicted not in the moment of weakness and death, but
scraping his glorious form with his strigil, after some victorious
contest in the games; here is the mounted warrior, slain before Corinth
whilst battling for his country, represented in the moment of
overthrowing beneath his flying charger some despairing foe.  We are
made to feel that these Athenians were fair and beautiful in their
lives, and that in their deaths they were not unworthy.  And we marvel,
and admire these monuments the more when we realize that they are not
the work of master sculptors but of ordinary paid craftsmen.  We turn
away praising the city that could produce such noble sculpture and call
it mere handicraft, and praising also the calm poise of soul,
uncomforted by revealed religion, which could make these monuments
common expressions of the bitterest, deepest, most vital emotions which
can ever come to men.[*]

[*] As Von Falke (_Greece and Rome_, p. 141) well says of these
monuments, “No skeleton, no scythe, no hour-glass is in them to bring a
shudder to the beholder.  As they [the departed] were in life, mother
and daughter, husband and wife, parents and children, here they are
represented together, sitting or standing, clasping each other’s hands
and looking at one another with love and sympathy as if it were their
customary affectionate intercourse.  What the stone perpetuates is the
love and happiness they enjoyed together, while yet they rejoiced in
life and the light of day.”




Chapter XII.
Trade, Manufactures, and Banking.


76.  The Commercial Importance of Athens.—While the funeral mourners
are wending their slow way homeward we have time to examine certain
phases of Athenian life at which we have previously glanced, then
ignored.  Certain it is, most “noble and good” gentlemen delight to be
considered persons of polite uncommercial leisure; equally certain it
is that a good income is about as desirable in Athens as anywhere else,
and many a stately “Eupatrid,” who seems to spend his whole time in
dignified walks, discoursing on politics or philosophy, is really
keenly interested in trades, factories, or farms, of which his less
nobly born stewards have the active management.  Indeed one of the
prime reasons for Athenian greatness is the fact that Athens is the
richest and greatest commercial city of Continental Hellas, with only
Corinth as a formidable rival.[*]

[*] Syracuse in distant Sicily was possibly superior to Athens in
commerce and economic prosperity, although incomparably behind her in
the empire of the arts and literature.


To understand the full extent of Athenian commercial prosperity we must
visit the Peiræus, yet in the main city itself will be found almost
enough examples of the chief kinds of economic activity.


77.  The Manufacturing Activities of Athens.—Attica is the seat of much
manufacturing.  Go to the suburbs:  everywhere is the rank odor of the
tanneries; down at the harbors are innumerable ship carpenters and sail
and tackle makers, busy in the shipyards; from almost every part of the
city comes the clang of hammer and anvil where hardware of all kinds is
being wrought in the smithies; and finally the potter makers are so
numerous as to require special mention hereafter.  But no list of all
the manufacturing activities is here possible; enough that practically
every known industry is represented in Athens, and the “industrial”
class is large.[*]  A very large proportion of the industrial laborers
are slaves, but by no means all.  A good many are real Athenian
citizens; a still larger proportion are “metics” (resident foreigners
without political rights).  The competition of slave labor, however,
tends to keep wages very low.  An unskilled laborer will have to be
content with his 3 obols (9 cents [1914] or $1.51 [2000]) per day; but
a trained workman will demand a drachma (18 cents [1914] or $3.02
[2000]) or even more.  There are no labor unions or trade guilds.  A
son usually, though not invariably, follows his father’s profession.
Each industry and line of work tends to have its own little street or
alley, preferably leading off the Agora.  “The Street of the Marble
Workers,” the “Street of the Box Makers,” and notably the “Street of
the Potters” contain nearly all the workshops of a given kind. Probably
you can find no others in the city.  Prices are regulated by custom and
competition; in case any master artisan is suspected of “enhancing” the
price of a needful commodity, or his shady business methods seem
dangerous to the public, there is no hesitation in invoking an old law
or passing a new one in the Assembly to bring him to account.

[*] For a very suggestive list of the numerous kinds of Greek
industries (practically all of which would be represented in Athens)
see H. J. Edwards, in Whibley’s _Companion to Greek Studies_, p. 431.


[Illustration: At the Smithy]


Manufacturers are theoretically under a social ban, and indeed yonder
petty shoemaker, who, with his two apprentices, first makes up his
cheap sandals, then sells them over the low counter before his own
ship, is very far from being a “leisurely” member of the “noble and the
good.”  But he who, like the late Lycophron, owns a furniture factory
employing nigh threescore slaves, can be sure of lying down on his
couch at a dinner party among the very best; for, as in twentieth
century England, even manufacture and “trade,” if on a sufficiently
large scale, cover a multitude of social sins.[*]

[*] Plato, probably echoing thoughtful Greek opinion, considered it bad
for manufacturers to be either too wealthy or too poor; thus a potter
getting too rich will neglect his art, and grow idle; if, however, he
cannot afford proper tools, he will manufacture inferior wares, and his
sons will be even worse workmen then he. Such comment obviously comes
from a society where most industrial life is on a small scale.


78.  The Commerce of Athens.—Part of Athenian wealth comes from the
busy factories, great and small, which seem everywhere; still more
riches come in by the great commerce which will be found centered at
the Peiræus.  Here is the spacious _Deigma_, a kind of exchange-house
where ship masters can lay out samples of their wares on display, and
sell to the important wholesalers, who will transmit to the petty
shopkeepers and the “ultimate consumer.”[*]

[*] Of course a very large proportion of Greek manufactures wares were
never exported, but were sold direct by the manufacturer to the
consumer himself.  This had various disadvantages; but there was this
large gain: _only one profit_ was necessary to be added to the mere
cost of production.  This aided to make Greece (from a modern
standpoint) a paradise of low prices.


There are certain articles of which various districts make a specialty,
and which Athens is constantly importing:  Bœtia sends chariots;
Thessaly, easy chairs; Chios and Miletos, bedding; and Miletos,
especially, very fine woolens.  Greece in general looks to Syria and
Arabia for the much-esteemed spices and perfumes; to Egypt for papyri
for the book rolls; to Babylonia for carpets.  To discuss the whole
problem of Athenian commerce would require a book in itself; but
certain main facts stand out clearly.  One is that Attica herself has
extremely few natural products to export—only her olive oil, her
Hymettus honey, and her magnificent marbles—dazzling white from
Pentelicos, gray from Hymettus, blue or black from Eleusis.  Again we
soon notice the great part which _grain_ plays in Athenian commerce. 
Attica raises such a small proportion of the necessary breadstuffs, and
so serious is the crisis created by any shortage, that all kinds of
measures are employed to compel a steady flow of grain from the Black
Sea ports into the Peiræus.  Here is a law which Domsthenes quotes to
us:—

“It shall not be lawful for any Athenian or any metic in Attica, or any
person under their control [_i.e._ slave or freedman] to lend out money
on a ship which is not commissioned to bring grain to Athens.”

A second law, even more drastic, forbids any such person to transport
grain to any harbor but the Peiræus.  The penalties for evading these
laws are terrific.  At set intervals also the Public Assembly
(Ecclesia) is in duty bound to consider the whole state of the grain
trade:  while the dealers in grain who seem to be cornering the market,
and forcing up the price of bread, are liable to prompt and disastrous
prosecution.


79.  The Adventurous Merchant Skippers.—Foreign trade at Athens is
fairly well systematized, but it still partakes of the nature of an
adventure.  The name for “skipper” (nauklëros) is often used
interchangeably for “merchant.”  Nearly all commerce is by sea, for
land routes are usually slow, unsafe, and inconvenient[*]; the average
foreign trader is also a shipowner, probably too the actual working
captain.  He has no special commodity, but will handle everything which
promises a profit.  A war is breaking out in Paphlagonia.  Away he
sails thither with a cargo of good Athenian shields, swords, and
lances.  He loads up in that barbarous but fertile country with grain;
but leaves enough room in his hold for some hundred skins of choice
wine which he takes aboard at Chios. The grain and wine are disembarked
at the Piræus.  Hardly are they ashore ere rumor tells him that salt
herring[+] are abundant and especially cheap at Corcyra; and off he
goes for a return cargo thereof, just lingering long enough to get on a
lading of Athenian olive oil.

[*] Naturally there was a safe land route from Athens across the
Isthmus to Corinth and thence to Sparta or towards Ellis; again, there
would be fair roads into Bœtia.


[+] Salt fish were a very usual and important article of Greek
commerce.


80.  Athenian Money-changers and Bankers.—An important factor in the
commerce of Athens is the “Money-changer.”  There is no one fixed
standard of coinage for Greece, let alone the Barbarian world.  Athens
strikes its money on a standard which has very wide acceptance, but
Corinth has another standard, and a great deal of business is also
transacted in Persian gold darics.  The result is that at the Peiræus
and near the Agora are a number of little “tables” where alert
individuals, with strong boxes beside them, are ready to sell foreign
coins to would-be travelers, or exchange darics for Attic drachmæ,
against a pretty favorable commission.

This was the beginning of the Athenian banker; but from being a mere
exchanger he has often passed far beyond, to become a real master of
credit and capital.  There are several of these highly important
gentlemen who now have a business and fortune equal to that of the
famous Pasion, who died in 370 B.C.  While the firm of Pasion and
Company was at its height, the proprietor derived  a net income of at
least 100 minæ (over $1,800 [1914] or $30,248.07 [2000]) per year from
his banking; and more than half as much extra from a shield factory.[*]

[*] These sums seem absurdly small for a great money magnate, but the
very high purchasing power of money in Athens must be borne in mind. 
We know a good deal about Pasion and his business from the speeches
which Deosthenes composed in the litigation which arose over his
estate.


81.  A Large Banking Establishment.—Enter now the “tables” of Nicanor. 
The owner is a metic; perhaps he claims to come from Rhodes, but the
shrewd cast of his eyes and the dark hue of his skin gives a suggestion
of the Syrian about him.  In his open office a dozen young half-naked
clerks are seated on low chairs—each with his tablet spread out upon
his knees laboriously computing long sums.[*]  The proprietor himself
acts as the cashier.  He has not neglected the exchange of foreign
moneys; but that is a mere incidental.  His first visitor this morning
presents a kind of letter of credit from a correspondent in Syracuse
calling for one hundred drachmæ.  “Your voucher?” asks Nicanor.  The
stranger produces the half of a coin broken in two across the middle. 
The proprietor draws a similar half coin from a chest.  The parts match
exactly, and the money is paid on the spot.  the next comer is an old
acquaintance, a man of wealth and reputation; he is followed by two
slaves bearing a heavy talent of coined silver which he wishes the
banker to place for him on an advantageous loan, against a due
commission.  The third visitor is a well-born but fast and idle young
man who is squandering his patrimony on flute girls and chariot horses.
 He wishes an advance of ten minæ, and it is given him—against the
mortgage of a house, at the ruinous interest of 36 per cent, for such
prodigals are perfectly fair play.  Another visitor is a careful and
competent ship merchant who is fitting for a voyage to Crete, and who
requires a loan to buy his return cargo.  Ordinary interest, well
secured, is 18 per cent, but a sea voyage, even at the calmest season,
is counted extra hazardous. The skipper must pay 24 per cent at least. 
A poor tradesman also appears to raise a trifle by pawning two silver
cups; and an unlucky farmer, who cannot meet his loan, persuades the
banker to extend the time “just until the next moon”[+]—of course at an
unmerciful compounding of interest.

[*] Without the Arabic system of numerals, elaborate bookkeeping surely
presented a sober face to the Greeks.  Their method of numeration was
very much like that with the so-called Roman numerals.


[+] “Watching the moon,” _i.e._ the end of the month when the debts
became due, appears to have been the melancholy recreation of many
Athenian debtors.  See Aristophanes’s _Clouds_, I. 18.


82.  Drawbacks to the Banking Business.—Nicanor has no paper money to
handle, no stocks, no bonds,—and the line between legitimate interest
and scandalous usury is by no means clearly drawn.  There is at least
one good excuse for demanding high interest.  It is notoriously hard to
collect bad debts.  Many and many a clever debtor has persuaded an
Athenian jury that _all_ taking of interest is somewhat immoral, and
the banker has lost at least his interest, sometimes too his principal.
 So long as this is the case, a banker’s career has its drawbacks; and
Demosthenes in a recent speech has commended the choice by Pasion’s son
of a factory worth 60 minæ per year, instead of his father’s banking
business worth nominally 100.  The former was so much more secure than
an income depending on “other people’s money!”

Finally it must be said that while Nicanor and Pasion have been
honorable and justly esteemed men, many of their colleagues have been
rogues.  Many a “table” has been closed very suddenly, when its owner
absconded, or collapsed in bankruptcy, and the unlucky depositors and
creditors have been left penniless, during the “rearrangement of the
tables,” as the euphemism goes.


83.  The Potter of Athens.—There is one other form of economic activity
in Athens which deserves our especial notice, different as it is from
the bankers’ tables,—the manufacture of earthen vases. A long time
might be spent investigating the subject; here there is room only for a
hasty glance.  For more than two hundred years Attica has been
supplying the world with a pottery which is in some respects superior
to any that has gone before, and also (all things considered) to any
that will follow, through night two and a half millenniums.  The
articles are primarily tall vases and urns, some for mere ornament or
for religious purposes,—some for very humble household utility;
however, besides the regular vases there is a great variety of dishes,
plates, pitchers, bowls, and cups all of the same general pattern,—a
smooth, black glaze[*] covered with figures in the delicate red of the
unglazed clay.  At first the figures had been in black and the
background in red, but by about 500 B.C. the superiority of the black
backgrounds had been fully realized and the process perfected.  For a
long time Athens had a monopoly of this beautiful earthenware, but now
in 360 B.C. there are creditable manufactories in other cities, and
especially in the Greek towns of Southern Italy.  The Athenian industry
is, however, still considerable; in fifty places up and down the city,
but particularly in the busy quarter of the Ceramicus, the potters’
wheels are whirling, and the glazers are adding the elegant patterns.

[*] Sometimes this glaze tended to a rich olive green or deep brown.


84.  Athenian Pottery an Expression of the Greek Sense of
Beauty.—Athens is proud of her traditions of naval and military glory;
of the commerce of the Peiræus; of her free laws and constitution; of
her sculptured temples, her poets, her rhetoricians and philosophers. 
Almost equally well might she be proud of her vases.  They are not
made—let us bear clearly in mind—by avowed artists, servants of the
Muses and of the Beautiful; they are the regular commercial products of
work-a-day craftsmen.  But what craftsmen!  In the first place, they
have given to every vase and dish a marvelous individuality.  There
seems to be absolutely no duplication of patterns.[*]  Again, since
these vases are made for Greeks, they must—no matter how humble and
commonplace their use—be made beautiful—elegantly shaped, well glazed,
and well painted:  otherwise, no matter how cheap, they will never find
a market.

[*] It is asserted that of the many thousands of extant Greek vases
that crowd the shelves of modern museums, there are nowhere two
patterns exactly alike.


The process of manufacture is simple, yet it needs a masterly touch.
After the potter has finished his work at the wheel and while the clay
is still soft, the decorator makes his rough design with a
blunt-pointed stylus.  A line of black glaze is painted around each
figure.  Then the black background is freely filled in, and the details
within the figure are added.  A surprisingly small number of deft lines
are needed to bring out the whole picture.[*]  Sometimes the glaze is
thinned out to a pale brown, to help in the drawing of the interior
contours.  When the design is completed, we have an amount of life and
expression which with the best potters is little short of startling. 
The subjects treated are infinite, as many as are the possible phases
of Greek life.  Scenes in the home and on the farm; the boys and their
masters at school; the warriors, the merchants, the priests
sacrificing, the young gallants serenading a sweet-heart; all the
tales, in short of poet-lore and mythology,—time would fail to list one
tenth of them.  Fairly we can assert that were all the books and formal
inscriptions about the Athenians to be blotted out, these vase
paintings almost photographs one might say, of Athenian daily life,
would give us back a very wide knowledge of the habits of the men in
the city of Athena.

[*] In this respect the Greek vase paintings can compete with the best
work in the Japanese prints.


The potters are justly proud of their work; often they do not hesitate
to add their signatures, and in this way later ages can name the
“craftsmen” who have transmitted to them these objects of abiding
beauty.  The designers also are accommodating enough to add descriptive
legends of the scenes which they depict,—Achilles, Hercules, Theseus,
and all the other heroes are carefully named, usually with the words
written above or beside them.

The pottery of Athens, then, is truly Athenian; that is to say, it is
genuinely elegant, ornamental, simple, and distinctive.  The best of
these great vases and mixing bowls are works of art no less than the
sculptures of Phidias upon the Parthenon.




Chapter XIII.
The Armed Forces of Athens.


85.  Military Life at Athens.—Hitherto we have seen almost nothing save
the peaceful civic side of Athenian life, but it is a cardinal error to
suppose that art, philosophy, farming, manufacturing, commerce, and
bloodless home politics sum up the whole of the activities of Attica. 
Athens is no longer the great imperial state she was in the days of
Pericles, but she is still one of the greatest military powers in
Greece,[*] and on her present armed strength rests a large share of her
prestige and prosperity.  Her fleet, which is still her particular
boast, must of course be seen at the Peiræus; but as we go about the
streets of the main city we notice many men, who apparently had
recently entered their house doors as plain, harmless citizens, now
emerging, clad in all the warrior’s bravery, and hastening towards one
of the gates.  Evidently a review is to be held of part of the citizen
army of Athens.  If we wish, we can follow and learn much of the Greek
system of warfare in general and of the Athenian army in particular.

[*] Of course the greatest military power of Greece had been Sparta
until 371 B.C., when the battle of Leuctra made Thebes temporarily “the
first land power.”


Even at the present day, when there is plenty of complaint that
Athenians are not willing to imitate the sturdy campaigning of their
fathers, the citizens seem always at war, or getting ready for it.
Every citizen, physically fit, is liable to military service from his
eighteenth to his sixtieth year.  To make efficient soldiers is really
the main end of the constant physical exercise.  If a young man takes
pride in his hard and fit body, if he flings spears at the stadium, and
learns to race in full armor, if he goes on long marches in the hot
sun, if he sleeps on the open hillside, or lies on a bed of rushes
watching the moon rise over the sea,—it is all to prepare himself for a
worthy part in the “big day” when Athens will confront some old or new
enemy on the battlefield.  A great deal of the conversation among the
younger men is surely not about Platonic ideals, Demosthenes’s last
political speech, nor the best fighting cocks; it is about spears,
shield-straps, camping ground, rations, ambuscades, or the problems of
naval warfare.

It is alleged with some show of justice that by this time Athenians are
so enamored with the pleasures of peaceful life that they prefer to pay
money for mercenary troops rather than serve themselves on distant
expeditions; and certain it is that there are plenty of Arcadians,
Thracians, and others, from the nations which supply the bulk of the
mercenaries, always in Athenian pay in the outlying garrisons.  Still
the old military tradition and organization for the citizens is kept
up, and half a generation later, when the freedom of Athens is blasted
before Philip the Macedonian at Chæroneia, it will be shown that if the
Athenian militia does not know how to conquer, it at least knows how to
die.  So we gladly follow to the review, and gather our information.


86.  The Organization of the Athenian Army.—After a young “ephebus” has
finished his two years of service in the garrisons he returns home
subject to call at the hour of need.  When there is necessity to make
up an army, enough men are summoned to meet the required number and no
more.  Thus for a small force only the eligibles between say twenty and
twenty-four years of age would be summoned; but in a crisis all the
citizens are levied up to the very graybeards. The levy is conducted by
the ten _Strategi_ (at once ‘generals,’ ‘admirals,’ and ‘war
ministers’) who control the whole armed power of Athens.  The recruits
summoned have to come with three days’ rations to the rendezvous,
usually to the Lyceum wrestling ground just outside the city.  In case
of a general levy the old men are expected to form merely a home guard
for the walls; the young men must be ready for hard service over seas.

The organization of the Athenian army is very simple; each of the ten
Attic tribes sends its own special battalion or _taxis_, which is large
or small according to the total size of the levy.[*]  These _taxeis_
are subdivided into companies or _lochoi_, of about an average of 100
men each.  The _taxeis_ are each under a tribal-colonel (_taxiarch_),
and each company under its captain (_locharch_).  The ten strategi
theoretically command the whole army together, but since bitter
experience teaches that ten generals are usually nine too many, a
special decree of the people often entrusts the supreme command of a
force to one commander, or at most to not over three. The other
strategi must conduct other expeditions, or busy themselves with their
multifarious home duties.

[*] Thus if 3000 men were called out, the average “taxis” would be 300
strong, but if 6000, then 600.


87.  The Hoplites and the Light Troops.—The unit of the Athenian
citizen army, like practically all Greek armies, is the heavy armed
infantry soldier, the _hoplite_.  An army of “three thousand men” is
often an army of so many hoplites, unless there is specific statement
to the contrary.  But really it is of six thousand men, to be entirely
accurate:  for along with every hoplite goes an attendant, a
“light-armed man,” either a poor citizen who cannot afford a regular
suit of armor,[*] or possibly a trusted slave. These “light-armed men”
carry the hoplites’ shields until the battle, and most of the baggage. 
They have javelins, and sometimes slings and bows.  They act as
skirmishers before the actual battle:  and while the hoplites are in
the real death-grip they harass the foe as they can, and guard the
camp.  When the fight is done they do their best to cover the retreat,
or slaughter the flying foe if their own hoplites are victorious.

[*] The hoplite’s panoply (see description later) was sufficiently
expensive to imply that its owner was at least a man in tolerable
circumstances.


88.  The Cavalry and the Peltasts.—There are certain divisions of the
army besides the hoplites and this somewhat ineffective light infantry.
 There is a cavalry corps of 1000.  Wealthy young Athenians are proud
to volunteer therein; it is a sign of wealth to be able to provide your
war horse.  The cavalry too is given the place of honor in the great
religious processions; and there is plenty of chance for exciting
scouting service on the campaign.  Again, the cavalry service has
something to commend it in that it is accounted _much safer_ than the
infantry![*]  The cavalry is, however, a rather feeble fighting
instrument.  Greek riders have no saddles and no stirrups.  They are
merely mounted on thin horse pads, and it is very hard to grip the
horse with the knees tightly enough to keep from being upset
ignominiously while wielding the spear.  The best use for the cavalry
perhaps is for the riders to take a sheaf of javelins, ride up and
discharge them at the foe as skirmishers, then fall back behind the
hoplites; though after the battle the horsemen will have plenty to do
in the retreat or the pursuit.

[*] Greeks could seldom have been brought to imitate the reckless
medieval cavaliers.  The example of Leonidas at Thermopylæ was more
commended than imitated.  Outside of Sparta at least, few Greeks would
have hesitated to flee from a battlefield, when the day (despite their
proper exertions) had been wholly lost.


The Athenians have of course the Scythian police archers to send into
any battle near Athens; they can also hire mercenary archers from
Crete, but the Greek bows are relatively feeble, only three or four
feet long—by no means equal to the terrible yew bows which will win
glory for England in the Middle Ages.  There has also come into vogue,
especially since the Peloponnesian war, an improved kind of
light-javelin-men,—the “Peltasts,”—with small shields, and light armor,
but with extra long lances.  In recent warfare this type of soldier,
carefully trained and agile, has been known to defeat bodies of the
old-style over-encumbered hoplites.[*] Nevertheless, most veteran
soldiers still believe that the heavy infantryman is everything, and
the backbone of nearly every Greek army is still surely the hoplite. 
He will continue to be the regular fighting unit until the improved
“phalanx,” and the “Companion Cavalry” of Philip and Alexander of
Macedon teach the captains of the world new lessons.

[*] Especially the Athenian general Iphicrates was able to cut to
pieces a _mora_ (brigade) of Spartan hoplites, in 392 B.C., by skillful
use of a force of peltasts.


89.  The Panoply of the Hoplite.—We have passed out one of the gates
and are very likely in a convenient open space south and east of the
city stretching away toward the ever visible slopes of gray Hymettus. 
Here is a suitable parade ground.  The citizen soldiers are slipping on
their helmets and tightening up their cuirasses. Trumpets blow from
time to time to give orders to “fall in” among the respective _lochoi_
and _taxeis_. There is plenty of time to study the arms and armor of
the hoplites during these preliminaries.

A very brief glance at the average infantryman’s defensive weapons
tells us that to be able to march, maneuver, and fight efficiently in
this armor implies that the Athenian soldier is a well-trained athlete.
 The whole panoply weighs many pounds.[*]  The prime parts in the armor
are the helmet, the cuirass, the greaves, and the shield.  Every
able-bodied citizen of moderate means has this outfit hanging in his
andronitis, and can don it at brief notice. The _helmet_ is normally of
bronze; it is cut away enough in front to leave the face visible, but
sometimes a cautious individual will insist on having movable plates
(which can be turned up and down) to protect the cheeks.[+]  Across the
top there runs a firm metal ridge to catch any hard down-right blow,
and set into the ridge is a tall nodding crest either of horsehair or
of bright feathers—in either 

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