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The Greek View of Life

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Title: The Greek View of Life

Author: G. Lowes Dickinson


        
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Language: English

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THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE

BY

G. LOWES DICKINSON, M.A.

SIXTH EDITION

NEW YORK

1909




PREFACE


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

It has been essential to my purpose to avoid, as far as may be, all
controversial matter; and if any classical scholar who may come across
this volume should be inclined to complain of omissions or evasions, I
would beg him to remember the object of the book and to judge it
according to its fitness for its own end.

"The Greek View of Life," no doubt, is a question-begging title, but I
believe it to have a quite intelligible meaning; for varied and manifold
as the phases may be that are presented by the Greek civilization, they
do nevertheless group themselves about certain main ideas, to be
distinguished with sufficient clearness from those which have dominated
other nations. It is these ideas that I have endeavoured to bring into
relief; and if I have failed, the blame, I submit, must be ascribed
rather to myself than to the nature of the task I have undertaken.

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

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




LIST OF TRANSLATIONS USED


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I.--THE GREEK VIEW OF RELIGION

1. Introductory

2. Greek Religion an Interpretation of Nature

3. Greek Religion an Interpretation of the Human Passions

4. Greek Religion the Foundation of Society

5. Religious Festivals

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

7. Divination, Omens, Oracles

8. Sacrifice and Atonement

9. Guilt and Punishment

10. Mysticism

11. The Greek View of Death and a Future Life

12. Critical and Sceptical Opinion in Greece

13. Ethical Criticism

14. Transition to Monotheism

15. Metaphysical Criticism

16. Metaphysical reconstruction--Plato

17. Summary


CHAPTER II.--THE GREEK VIEW OF THE STATE

1. The Greek State a "City"

2. The Relation of the State to the Citizen

3. The Greek View of Law

4. Artisans and Slaves

5. The Greek State primarily Military, not Industrial

6. Forms of Government in the Greek State

7. Faction and Anarchy

8. Property and the Communistic Ideal

9. Sparta

10. Athens

11. Sceptical Criticism of the Basis of the State

12. Summary


CHAPTER III.--THE GREEK VIEW OF THE INDIVIDUAL

1. The Greek View of Manual Labour and Trade

2. Appreciation of External Goods

3. Appreciation of Physical Qualities

4. Greek Athletics

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

6. The Greek View of Pleasure

7. Illustrations.--Ischomachus; Socrates

8. The Greek View of Woman

9. Protests against the Common View of Woman

10. Friendship

11. Summary


CHAPTER IV.--THE GREEK VIEW OF ART

1. Greek Art an Expression of National Life

2. Identification of the Aesthetic and Ethical points of View

3. Sculpture and Painting

4. Music and the Dance

5. Poetry

6. Tragedy

7. Comedy

8. Summary


CHAPTER V.--CONCLUSION




THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE




CHAPTER I

THE GREEK VIEW OF RELIGION


Section 1. Introductory.

In approaching the subject of the religion of the Greeks it is necessary
to dismiss at the outset many of the associations which we are naturally
inclined to connect with that word. What we commonly have in our mind
when we speak of religion is a definite set of doctrines, of a more or
less metaphysical character, formulated in a creed and supported by an
organisation distinct from the state. And the first thing we have to
learn about the religion of the Greeks is that it included nothing of
the kind. There was no church, there was no creed, there were no
articles; there was no doctrine even, unless we are so to call a chaos
of legends orally handed down and in continual process of transformation
by the poets. Priests there were, but they were merely public officials,
appointed to perform certain religious rites. The distinction between
cleric and layman, as we know it, did not exist; the distinction between
poetry and dogma did not exist; and whatever the religion of the Greeks
may have been, one thing at any rate is clear, that it was something
very different from all that we are in the habit of associating with the
word.

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

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


Section 2. Greek Religion an Interpretation of Nature.

When we try to conceive the state of mind of primitive man the first
thing that occurs to us is the bewilderment and terror he must have felt
in the presence of the powers of nature. Naked, houseless, weaponless,
he is at the mercy, every hour, of this immense and incalculable
Something so alien and so hostile to himself. As fire it burns, as water
it drowns, as tempest it harries and destroys; benignant it may be at
times, in warm sunshine and calm, but the kindness is brief and
treacherous. Anyhow, whatever its mood, it has to be met and dealt with.
By its help, or, if not, in the teeth of its resistance, every step in
advance must be won; every hour, every minute, it is there to be
reckoned with. What is it then, this persistent, obscure, unnameable
Thing? What is it? The question haunts the mind; it will not be put
aside; and the Greek at last, like other men under similar conditions,
only with a lucidity and precision peculiar to himself, makes the reply,
"it is something like myself." Every power of nature he presumes to be a
spiritual being, impersonating the sky as Zeus, the earth as Demeter,
the sea as Poseidon; from generation to generation under his shaping
hands, the figures multiply and define themselves; character and story
crystallise about what at first were little more than names; till at
last, from the womb of the dark enigma that haunted him in the
beginning, there emerges into the charmed light of a world of ideal
grace a pantheon of fair and concrete personalities. Nature has become a
company of spirits; every cave and fountain is haunted by a nymph; in
the ocean dwell the Nereids, in the mountain the Oread, the Dryad in the
wood; and everywhere, in groves and marshes, on the pastures or the
rocky heights, floating in the current of the streams or traversing
untrodden snows, in the day at the chase and as evening closes in
solitude fingering his flute, seen and heard by shepherds, alone or with
his dancing train, is to be met the horned and goat-footed, the sunny-
smiling Pan.

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

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

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

"With that he gathered the clouds and troubled the waters of the deep,
grasping his trident in his hands; and he roused all storms of all
manner of winds, and shrouded in clouds the land and sea: and down sped
night from heaven. The East Wind and the South Wind clashed, and the
stormy West, and the North, that is born in the bright air, rolling
onward a great wave." [Footnote: Odyss. v. 282.--Translated by Butcher
and Lang.]

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

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

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

"But at the hour when the Morning Star goeth forth to herald light upon
the earth, the star that saffron-mantled Dawn cometh after, and
spreadeth over the salt sea, then grew the burning faint, and the flame
died down. And the Winds went back again to betake them home over the
Thracian main, and it roared with a violent swell. Then the son of
Peleus turned away from the burning and lay down wearied, and sweet
sleep leapt on him." [Footnote: Iliad xxiii. p. 193.--Translated by
Lang, Leaf and Myers.]

The exquisite beauty of this passage, even in translation, will escape
no lover of poetry. And it is a beauty which depends on the character of
the Greek religion; on the fact that all that is unintelligible in the
world, all that is alien to man, has been drawn, as it were, from its
dark retreat, clothed in radiant form, and presented to the mind as a
glorified image of itself. Every phenomenon of nature, night and "rosy-
fingered" dawn, earth and sun, winds, rivers, and seas, sleep and
death,--all have been transformed into divine and conscious agents, to
be propitiated by prayer, interpreted by divination, and comprehended by
passions and desires identical with those which stir and control
mankind.


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

And as with the external world, so with the world within. The powers of
nature were not the only ones felt by man to be different from and alien
to himself; there were others, equally strange, dwelling in his own
heart, which, though in a sense they were part of him, yet he felt to be
not himself, which came upon him and possessed him without his choice
and against his will. With these too he felt the need to make himself at
home, and these too, to satisfy his need, he shaped into creatures like
himself. To the whole range of his inner experience he gave definition
and life, presenting it to himself in a series of spiritual forms. In
Aphrodite, mother of Eros, he incarnated the passion of love, placing in
her broidered girdle "love and desire of loving converse that steals the
wits even of the wise"; in Ares he embodied the lust of war; in Athene,
wisdom; in Apollo, music and the arts. The pangs of guilt took shape in
the conception of avenging Furies; and the very prayers of the
worshipper sped from him in human form, wrinkled and blear-eyed, with
halting pace, in the rear of punishment. Thus the very self of man he
set outside himself; the powers, so intimate, and yet so strange, that
swayed him from within he made familiar by making them distinct;
converted their shapeless terror into the beauty of visible form; and by
merely presenting them thus to himself in a guise that was immediately
understood, set aside, if he could not answer, the haunting question of
their origin and end.

Here then is at least a partial reply to our question as to the effect
of a belief in the gods on the feeling of the Greek. To repeat the
phrase once more, it made him at home in the world. The mysterious
powers that controlled him it converted into beings like himself; and so
gave him heart and breathing-space, shut in, as it were, from the abyss
by this shining host of fair and familiar forms, to turn to the
interests and claims of the passing hour an attention undistracted by
doubt and fear.


Section 4. Greek Religion the Foundation of Society.

But this relation to the world of nature is only one side of man's life;
more prominent and more important, at a later stage of his development,
is his relation to society; and here too in Greek civilization a great
part was played by religion. For the Greek gods, we must remember, were
not purely spiritual powers, to be known and approached only in the
heart by prayer. They were beings in human form, like, though superior
to ourselves, who passed a great part of their history on earth,
intervened in the affairs of men, furthered or thwarted their
undertakings, begat among them sons and daughters, and followed, from
generation to generation, the fortunes of their children's children.
Between them and mankind there was no impassable gulf; from Heracles the
son of Zeus was descended the Dorian race; the Ionians from Ion, son of
Apollo; every family, every tribe traced back its origin to a "hero",
and these "heroes" were children of the gods, and deities themselves.
Thus were the gods, in the most literal sense, the founders of society;
from them was derived, even physically, the unit of the family and the
race; and the whole social structure raised upon that natural basis was
necessarily penetrated through and through by the spirit of religion.

We must not therefore be misled by the fact that there was no church in
the Greek state to the idea that the state recognised no religion; on
the contrary, religion was so essential to the state, so bound up with
its whole structure, in general and in detail, that the very conception
of a separation between the powers was impossible. If there was no
separate church, in our sense of the term, as an independent organism
within the state, it was because the state, in one of its aspects, was
itself a church, and derived its sanction, both as a whole and in its
parts, from the same gods who controlled the physical world. Not only
the community as a whole but all its separate minor organs were under
the protection of patron deities. The family centred in the hearth,
where the father, in his capacity of priest, offered sacrifice and
prayer to the ancestors of the house; the various corporations into
which families were grouped, the local divisions for the purpose of
taxation, elections, and the like, derived a spiritual unity from the
worship of a common god; and finally the all-embracing totality of the
state itself was explained and justified to all its members by the cult
of the special protecting deity to whom its origin and prosperous
continuance were due. The sailor who saw, on turning the point of
Sunium, the tip of the spear of Athene glittering on the Acropolis,
beheld in a type the spiritual form of the state; Athene and Athens were
but two aspects of the same thing; and the statue of the goddess of
wisdom dominating the city of the arts may serve to sum up for us the
ideal of that marvellous corporate life where there was no
ecclesiastical religion only because there was no secular state.

Regarded from this point of view, we may say that the religion of the
Greeks was the spiritual side of their political life. And we must add
that in one respect their religion pointed the way to a higher political
achievement than they were ever able to realise in fact. One fatal
defect of the Greek civilisation, as is familiar to students of their
history, was the failure of the various independent city states to
coalesce into a single harmonious whole. But the tendency of religion
was to obviate this defect. We find, for example, that at one time or
another federations of states were formed to support in common the cult
of some god; and one cult in particular there was--that of the Delphian
Apollo--whose influence on political no less than on religious life was
felt as far as and even beyond the limits of the Greek race. No colony
could be founded, no war hazarded, no peace confirmed, without the
advice and approval of the god--whose cult was thus at once a religious
centre for the whole of Greece, and a forecast of a political unity that
should co-ordinate into a whole her chaos of conflicting states.

The religion of the Greeks being thus, as we have seen, the
presupposition and bond of their political life, we find its sanction
extended at every point to custom and law. The persons of heralds, for
example, were held to be under divine protection; treaties between
states and contracts between individuals were confirmed by oath; the
vengeance of the gods was invoked upon infringers of the law; national
assemblies and military expeditions were inaugurated by public prayers;
the whole of corporate life, in short, social and political, was so
embraced and bathed in an idealising element of ritual that the secular
and religious aspects of the state must have been as inseparable to a
Greek in idea as we know them to have been in constitution.


Section 5. Religious Festivals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us pass to our second illustration, the great city-festival of
Athens. In the Anthesteria it was a moment of nature that was seized and
idealized; here, in the Panathenaea, it is the forms of social life, its
distinctions within its embracing unity, that are set forth in their
interdependence as functions of a spiritual life. In this great national
fete, held every four years, all the higher activities of Athenian life
were ideally displayed--contests of song, of lyre and of flute, foot and
horse races, wrestling, boxing, and the like, military evolutions of
infantry and horse, pyrrhic dances symbolic of attack and defence in
war, mystic chants of women and choruses of youths--the whole
concentring and discharging itself in that great processional act in
which, as it were, the material forms of society became transparent, and
the Whole moved on, illumined and visibly sustained by the spiritual
soul of which it was the complete and harmonious embodiment. Of this
procession we have still in the frieze of the Parthenon a marble
transcript. There we may see the life of ancient Athens moving in stone,
from the first mounting of their horses by isolated youths, like the
slow and dropping prelude of a symphony, on to the thronged and
trampling ranks of cavalry, past the antique chariots reminiscent of
Homeric war, and the marching band of flutes and zithers, by lines of
men and maidens bearing sacrificial urns, by the garlanded sheep and
oxen destined for sacrifice, to where, on turning the corner that leads
to the eastern front, we find ourselves in the presence of the Olympian
gods themselves, enthroned to receive the offering of a people's life.
And if to this marble representation we add the colour it lacks, the
gold and silver of the vessels, the purple and saffron robes; if we set
the music playing and bid the oxen low; if we gird our living picture
with the blaze of an August noon and crown it with the Acropolis of
Athens, we may form a conception, better perhaps than could otherwise be
obtained, of what religion really meant to the citizen of a state whose
activities were thus habitually symbolised in the cult of its patron
deity. Religion to him, clearly, could hardly be a thing apart, dwelling
in the internal region of the soul and leaving outside, untouched by the
light of the ideal, the whole business and complexity of the material
side of life; to him it was the vividly present and active soul of his
corporate existence, representing in the symbolic forms of ritual the
actual facts of his experience. What he re-enacted periodically, in
ordered ceremony, was but the drama of his daily life; so that, as we
said before, the state in one of its aspects was a church, and every
layman from one point of view a priest.

The question, "What did a belief in the gods really mean to the Greek"
has now received at least some sort of answer. It meant, to recur to our
old phrase, that he was made at home in the world. In place of the
unintelligible powers of nature, he was surrounded by a company of
beings like himself; and these beings who controlled the physical world
were also the creators of human society. From them were descended the
Heroes who founded families and states; and under their guidance and
protection cities prospered and throve. Their histories were recounted
in innumerable myths, and these again were embodied in ritual. The whole
life of man, in its relations both to nature and to society, was
conceived as derived from and dependent upon his gods; and this
dependence was expressed and brought vividly home to him in a series of
religious festivals. Belief in the gods was not to him so much an
intellectual conviction, as a spiritual atmosphere in which he moved;
and to think it away would be to think away the whole structure of Greek
civilisation.


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

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

To this question we may answer at once, broadly speaking, No! It was, we
might say, a distinguishing characteristic of the Greek religion that it
did not concern itself with the conscience at all; the conscience, in
fact, did not yet exist, to enact that drama of the soul with God which
is the main interest of the Christian, or at least of the Protestant
faith. To bring this point home to us let us open the "Pilgrim's
Progress", and present to ourselves, in its most vivid colours, the
position of the English Puritan:

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

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

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

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

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


Section 7. Divination, Omens, Oracles.

Let us take first a question which much exercised the Greek mind--the
difficulty of forecasting the future. Clearly, the notion that the world
was controlled by a crowd of capricious deities, swayed by human
passions and desires, was incompatible with the idea of fixed law; but
on the other hand it made it possible to suppose that some intimation
might be had from the gods, either directly or symbolically, of what
their intentions and purposes really were. And on this hypothesis we
find developed quite early in Greek history, a complex art of divining
the future by signs. The flight of birds and other phenomena of the
heavens, events encountered on the road, the speech of passers-by, or,
most important of all, the appearance of the entrails of the victims
sacrificed were supposed to indicate the probable course of events. And
this art, already mature in the time of the Homeric poems, we find
flourishing throughout the historic age. Nothing could better indicate
its prevalence and its scope than the following passage from
Aristophanes, where he ridicules the readiness of his contemporaries to
see in everything an omen, or, as he puts it, punning on the Greek word,
a "bird": "On us you depend," sings his chorus of Birds,

     "On us you depend, and to us you repair
     For counsel and aid, when a marriage is made,
     A purchase, a bargain, a venture in trade;
     Unlucky or lucky, whatever has struck ye,
     An ox or an ass, that may happen to pass,
     A voice in the street, or a slave that you meet,
     A name or a word by chance overheard,
     You deem it an omen, and call it a Bird."
          [Footnote: Aristoph. "Birds" 717.--Frere's translation.]

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

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

Nor must it be supposed that this phase of the Greek religion was a
superstition confined to individuals; on the contrary, it was fully
recognised by the state. No important public act could be undertaken
without a previous consultation of omens. More than once, in the
clearest and most brilliant period of the Greek civilisation, we hear of
military expeditions being abandoned because the sacrifices were
unfavourable; and at the time of the Persian invasion, at the most
critical moment of the history of Greece, the Lacedaemonians, we are
told, came too late to be present at the battle of Marathon, because
they thought it unlucky to start until the moon was full.

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


Section 8. Sacrifice and Atonement.

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

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

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

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

How far is all this from the Puritan view of sin! How far from the
Christian of the "Pilgrim's Progress" with the burden on his back! To
measure the distance we have only to attend, with this passage in our
mind, a meeting, say, of the "Salvation Army". We shall then perhaps
understand better the distinction between the popular religion of the
Greeks and our own; between the conception of sin as a physical
contagion to be cured by external rites, and the conception of it as an
affection of the conscience which only "grace" can expel. In the one
case the fact that a man was under the taint of crime would be borne in
upon him by actual misfortune from without--by sickness, or failure in
business, or some other of the troubles of life; and he would ease his
mind and recover the spring of hope by performing certain ceremonies and
rites. In the other case, his trouble is all inward; he feels that he is
guilty in the sight of God, and the only thing that can relieve him is
the certainty that he has been forgiven, assured him somehow or other
from within. The difference is fundamental, and important to bear in
mind, if we would form a clear conception of the Greek view of life.


Section 9. Guilt and Punishment.

It must not be supposed, however, that the popular superstition
described by Plato, however characteristic it may be of the point of
view of the Greeks, represents the highest reach of their thought on the
subject of guilt. No profounder utterances are to be found on this theme
than those of the great poets and thinkers of Greece, who, without
rejecting the common beliefs of their time, transformed them by the
insight of their genius into a new and deeper significance. Specially
striking in this connection is the poetry of the tragedian Aeschylus;
and it will be well worth our while to pause for a moment and endeavour
to realise his position.

Guilt and its punishment is the constant theme of the dramas of
Aeschylus; and he has exhausted the resources of his genius in the
attempt to depict the horror of the avenging powers, who under the name
of the Erinyes, or Furies, persecute and torment the criminal. Their
breath is foul with the blood on which they feed; from their rheumy eyes
a horrible humour drops; daughters of night and clad in black they fly
without wings; god and man and the very beasts shun them; their place is
with punishment and torture, mutilation, stoning and breaking of necks.
And into their mouth the poet has put words which seem to breathe the
very spirit of the Jewish scriptures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no poetry more sublime than this; none more penetrated with the
sense of moral law. But still it is wholly Greek in character. The theme
is not really the conscience of the sinner but the objective consequence
of his crime. "Blood calls for blood," is the poet's text; a man, he
says, must pay for what he does. The tragedy is the punishment of the
guilty, not his inward sense of sin. Orestes, in fact, who is the
subject of the drama with which we are concerned, in a sense was not a
sinner at all. He had killed his mother, it is true, but only to avenge
his father whom she had murdered, and at the express bidding of Apollo.
So far is he from feeling the pangs of conscience that he constantly
justifies his act. He suffers, not because he has sinned but because he
is involved in the curse of his race. For generations back the house of
Atreus had been tainted with blood; murder had called for murder to
avenge it; and Orestes, the last descendant, caught in the net of guilt,
found that his only possibility of right action lay in a crime. He was
bound to avenge his father, the god Apollo had enjoined it; and the
avenging of his father meant the murder of his mother. What he commits,
then, is a crime, but not a sin; and so it is regarded by the poet. The
tragedy, as we have said, centres round an external objective law--
"blood calls for blood." But that is all. Of the internal drama of the
soul with God, the division of the man against himself, the remorse, the
repentance, the new birth, the giving or withholding of grace--of all
this, the essential content of Christian Protestantism, not a trace in
the clear and concrete vision of the Greek. The profoundest of the poets
of Hellas, dealing with the darkest problem of guilt, is true to the
plastic genius of his race. The spirit throws outside itself the law of
its own being; by objective external evidence it learns that doing
involves suffering; and its moral conviction comes to it only when
forced upon it from without by a direct experience of physical evil. Of
Aeschylus, the most Hebraic of the Hellenes, it is as true as of the
average Greek, that in the Puritan meaning of the phrase he had no sense
of sin. And even in treating of him, we must still repeat what we said
at the beginning, that the Greek conception of the relation of man to
the gods is external and mechanical, not inward and spiritual.


Section 10. Mysticism.

But there is nothing so misleading as generalisation, specially on the
subject of the Greeks. Again and again when we think we have laid hold
of their characteristic view we are confronted with some new aspect of
their life which we cannot fit into harmony with our scheme. There is no
formula which will sum up that versatile and many-sided people. And so,
in the case before us, we have no sooner made what appears to be the
safe and comprehensive statement that the Greeks conceived the relation
of man to the gods mechanically, than we are reminded of quite another
phase of their religion, different from and even antithetic to that with
which we have hitherto been concerned. Nothing, we might be inclined to
say on the basis of what we have at present ascertained, nothing could
be more opposed to the clear anthropomorphic vision of the Greek, than
that conception of a mystic exaltation, so constantly occurring in the
history of religion, whose aim is to transcend the limits of human
personality and pass into direct communion with the divine life. Yet of
some such conception, and of the ritual devised under its influence, we
have undoubted though fragmentary indications in the civilization of the
Greeks. It is mainly in connection with the two gods Apollo and Dionysus
that the phenomena in question occur; gods whose cult was introduced
comparatively late into Greece and who brought with them from the north
something of its formless but pregnant mystery; as though at a point the
chain of guardian deities was broken, and the terror and forces of the
abyss pressed in upon the charmed circle of Hellas. For Apollo, who in
one of his aspects is a figure so typically Hellenic, the ever-young and
beautiful god of music and the arts, was also the Power of prophetic
inspiration, of ecstasy or passing out of oneself. The priestess who
delivered his oracle at Delphi was possessed and mastered by the god.
Maddened by mephitic vapours streaming from a cleft in the rock,
convulsed in every feature and every limb, she delivered in semi-
articulate cries the burden of the divine message. Her own personality,
for the time being, was annihilated; the wall that parts man from god
was swept away; and the Divine rushed in upon the human vessel it
shattered as it filled. This conception of inspiration as a higher form
of madness, possessed of a truer insight than that of sanity, was fully
recognised among the Greeks. "There is a madness," as Plato puts it,
"which is the special gift of heaven, and the source of the chiefest
blessings among men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at
Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have
conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but
when in their senses few or none.... And in proportion as prophecy is
higher and more perfect than divination both in name and reality, in the
same proportion, as the ancients testify, is madness superior to a sane
mind, for the one is only of human, but the other of divine origin."
[Footnote: Plato, Phaedrus, 244.--Jowett's translation.]

Here then, in the oracle at Delphi, the centre of the religious life
of the Greeks, we have an explicit affirmation of that element of
mysticism which we might have supposed to be the most alien to their
genius; and the same element re-appears, in a cruder and more barbaric
form, in connection with the cult of Dionysus. He, the god of wine,
was also the god of inspiration; and the ritual with which he was
worshipped was a kind of apotheosis of intoxication. To suppress for a
time the ordinary work-a-day consciousness, with its tedium, its
checks, its balancing of pros and cons, to escape into the directness
and simplicity of mere animal life, and yet to feel in this no
degradation but rather a submission to the divine power, an actual
identification with the deity-such, it would seem, was the intention
of those extraordinary revels of which we have in the "Bacchae" of
Euripides so vivid a description. And to this end no stimulus was
omitted to excite and inspire the imagination and the sense. The
influence of night and torches in solitary woods, intoxicating drinks,
the din of flutes and cymbals on a bass of thunderous drums, dances
convulsing every limb and dazzling eyes and brain, the harking-back,
as it were, to the sympathies and forms of animal life in the dress of
fawnskin, the horns, the snakes twined about the arm, and the
impersonation of those strange half-human creatures who were supposed
to attend upon the god, the satyrs, nymphs, and fauns who formed his
train--all this points to an attempt to escape from the bounds of
ordinary consciousness and pass into some condition conceived, however
confusedly, as one of union with the divine power. And though the
basis, clearly enough, is physical and even bestial, yet the whole
ritual does undoubtedly express, and that with a plastic grace and
beauty that redeems its frank sensuality, that passion to transcend
the limitations of human existence which is at the bottom of the
mystic element in all religions.

But this orgy of the senses was not the only form which the worship of
Dionysus took in Greece. In connection with one of his legends, the myth
of Dionysus Zagreus, we find traces of an esoteric doctrine, taught by
what were known as the orphic sects, very curiously opposed, one would
have said, to the general trend of Greek conceptions. According to the
story, Zagreus was the son of Zeus and Persephone. Hera, in her
jealousy, sent the Titans to destroy him; after a struggle, they managed
to kill him, cut him up and devoured all but the heart, which was saved
by Athene and carried to Zeus. Zeus swallowed it, and produced therefrom
a second Dionysus. The Titans he destroyed by lightning, and from their
ashes created Man. Man is thus composed of two elements, one bad, the
Titanic, the other good, the Dionysiac; the latter being derived from
the body of Dionysus, which the Titans had devoured. This fundamental
dualism, according to the doctrine founded on the myth, is the perpetual
tragedy of man's existence; and his perpetual struggle is to purify
himself of the Titanic element. The process extends over many
incarnations, but an ultimate deliverance is promised by the aid of the
redeemer Dionysus Lysius.

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

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


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

Of all the problems on which we expect light to be thrown by religion
none, to us, is more pressing than that of death. A fundamental, and as
many believe, the most essential part of Christianity, is its doctrine
of reward and punishment in the world beyond; and a religion which had
nothing at all to say about this great enigma we should hardly feel to
be a religion at all. And certainly on this head the Greeks, more than
any people that ever lived, must have required a consolation and a hope.
Just in proportion as their life was fuller and richer than that which
has been lived by any other race, just in proportion as their capacity
for enjoyment, in body and soul, was keener, as their senses were finer,
their intellect broader, their passions more intense, must they have
felt, with peculiar emphasis, the horror of decay and death. And such,
in fact, is the characteristic note of their utterances on this theme.
"Rather," says the ghost of Achilles to Odysseus in the world of shades,
"rather would I live upon the soil as the hireling of another, with a
landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the
dead that are no more." [Footnote: Od. xi 489.--Translated by Butcher
and Lang.] Better, as Shakespeare has it,

     "The weariest and most loathed worldly life
     That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
     Can lay on nature,"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From such a conception of the life after death little comfort could be
drawn; nor does it appear that any was sought. So far as we can trace
the habitual attitude of the Greek he seems to have occupied himself
little with speculation, either for good or evil, as to what might await
him on the other side of the tomb. He was told indeed in his legends of
a happy place for the souls of heroes, and of torments reserved for
great criminals; but these ideas do not seem to have haunted his
imagination. He was never obsessed by that close and imminent vision of
heaven and hell which overshadowed and dwarfed, for the mediaeval mind,
the brief space of pilgrimage on earth. Rather he turned, by preference,
from the thought of death back to life, and in the memory of honourable
deeds in the past and the hope of fame for the future sought his
compensation for the loss of youth and love. In the great funeral speech
upon those who have fallen in war which Thucydides puts into the mouth
of Pericles we have, we must suppose, a reflection, more accurate than
is to be found elsewhere, of the position naturally adopted by the
average Greek. And how simple are the topics, how broad and human, how
rigorously confined to the limits of experience! There is no suggestion
anywhere of a  personal existence continued after death; the dead live
only in their deeds; and only by memory are the survivors to be
consoled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Section 12. Critical and Sceptical Opinion in Greece.

And now let us turn to a point for which perhaps some readers have long
been waiting, and with which they may have expected us to begin rather
than to end. So far, in considering the part played by religion in Greek
Life, we have assumed the position of orthodoxy. We have endeavoured to
place ourselves at the standpoint of the man who did not criticise or
reflect, but accepted simply, as a matter of course, the tradition
handed down to him by his fathers. Only so, if at all, was it possible
for us to detach ourselves from our habitual preconceptions, and to
regard the pagan mythology not as a graceful invention of the poets, but
as a serious and, at the time, a natural and inevitable way of looking
at the world. Now, however, it is time to turn to the other side, and to
consider the Greek religion as it appeared to contemporary critics. For
critics there were, and sceptics, or rather, to put it more exactly,
there was a critical age succeeding an age of faith. As we trace,
however imperfectly, the development of the Greek mind, we can observe
their intellect and their moral sense expanding beyond the limits of
their creed. Either as sympathetic, though candid, friends, or as avowed
enemies, they bring to light its contradictions and defects; and as a
result of the process one of two things happens. Either the ancient
conception of the gods is transformed in the direction of monotheism, or
it is altogether swept away, and a new system of the world built up, on
the basis of natural science or of philosophy. These tendencies of
thought we must now endeavour to trace; for we should have formed but an
imperfect idea of the scope of the religious consciousness of the Greeks
if we confined ourselves to what we may call their orthodox faith. It is
in their most critical thinkers, in Euripides and Plato, that the
religious sense is most fully and keenly developed; and it is in the
philosophy that supervened upon the popular creed, rather than in the
popular creed itself, that we shall find the highest and most spiritual
reaches of their thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Lady, ever art thou imagining, nor can I escape thee; yet shalt thou in
no wise have power to fulfil, but wilt be the further from my heart;
that shall be even the worse for thee. Hide thou in silence and hearken
to my bidding, lest all the gods that are in Olympus keep not off from
thee my visitation, when I put forth my hands unapproachable against
thee." [Footnote: Iliad i. 560.--Translated by Leaf, Lang and Myers.]


Section 13. Ethical Criticism.

The incongruity of all this with any adequate conception of deity is
patent, if once the critical attitude be adopted; and it was adopted by
some of the clearest and most religious minds of Greece. Nay, even
orthodoxy itself did not refrain from a genial and sympathetic
criticism. Aristophanes, for example, who, if there had been an
established church, would certainly have been described as one of its
main pillars, does not scruple to represent his Birds as issuing--

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

and Heracles the glutton, and Dionysus, the dandy and the coward, are
familiar figures of his comic stage. The attitude of Aristophanes, it is
true, is not really critical, but sympathetic; it was no more his
intention to injure the popular creed by his fun than it is the
intention of the cartoons of Punch to undermine the reputation of our
leading statesmen. On the contrary, nothing popularises like genial
ridicule; and of this Aristophanes was well aware. But the same
characteristics of the god which suggested the friendly burlesque of the
comedian were also those which provoked the indignation and the disgust
of more serious minds. The poet Pindar, for example, after referring to
the story of a battle, in which it was said gods had fought against
gods, breaks out into protest against a legend so little creditable to
the divine nature:--" O my mouth, fling this tale from thee, for to
speak evil of gods is a hateful wisdom, and loud and unmeasured words
strike a note that trembleth upon madness. Of such things talk thou not;
leave war and all strife of immortals aside." [Footnote: Pind. Ol. IX
54.--Translation by E. Myers.] And the same note is taken up with
emphasis, and reiterated in every quality of tone, by such writers as
Euripides and Plato.

The attitude of Euripides towards the popular religion is so clearly and
frankly critical that a recent writer has even gone so far as to
maintain that his main object in the construction of his dramas was to
discredit the myths he selected for his theme. However that may have
been, it is beyond controversy true that the deep religious sense of
this most modern of the Greeks was puzzled and repelled by the tales he
was bound by tradition to dramatize; and that he put into the mouth of
his characters reflexions upon the conduct of the gods which if they may
not be taken as his own deliberate opinions, are at least expressions of
one aspect of his thought. It was, in fact, impossible to reconcile with
a profound and philosophic view of the divine nature the intrigues and
amours, partialities, antipathies, actions and counter-actions of these
anthropomorphic deities. Consider, for example, the most famous of all
the myths, that of Orestes, to which we have already referred. Orestes,
it will be remembered, was the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.
Agamemnon, on his return from Troy, was murdered by Clytemnestra.
Orestes escapes; but returns later, at the instigation of Apollo, and
kills his mother to avenge his father. Thereupon, in punishment for his
crime, he is persecuted by the Furies. Now the point which Euripides
seizes here is the conduct of Apollo. Either it was right for Orestes to
kill his mother, or it was wrong. If wrong, why did Apollo command it?
If right, why was Orestes punished? Or are there, as Aeschylus would
have it, two "rights", one of Apollo, the other of the Furies? If so,
what becomes of that unity of the divine law after which every religious
nature seeks? "Phoebus," cries the Orestes of Euripides, "prophet though
he be, deceived me. I gave him my all, I killed my mother in obedience
to his command; and in return I am undone myself." [Footnote: Euripides,
Iph. Taur. 711] The dilemma is patent; and Euripides makes no serious
attempt to meet it.

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

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

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

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


Section 14. Transition to Monotheism.

The myths, but not religion! The criticism certainly of Plato and
probably of Euripides was prompted by the desire not to discredit
altogether the belief in the gods, but to bring it into harmony with the
requirements of a more fully developed consciousness. The philosopher
and the poet came not to destroy, but to fulfil; not to annihilate but
to transform the popular theology. Such an intention, strange as it may
appear to us with our rigid creeds, we shall see to be natural enough to
the Greek mind, when we remember that the material of their religion was
not a set of propositions, but a more or less indeterminate body of
traditions capable of being presented in the most various forms as the
genius and taste of individual poets might direct. And we find, in fact,
that the most religious poets of Greece, those even who were most
innocent of any intention to innovate on popular beliefs, did
nevertheless unconsciously tend to transform, in accordance with their
own conceptions, the whole structure of the Homeric theology. Taking
over the legends of gods and heroes, as narrated in poetry and
tradition, the earlier tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, as they
shaped and reshaped their material for the stage, were evolving for
themselves, not in opposition to but as it were on the top of the
polytheistic view, the idea of a single supreme and righteous God. The
Zeus of Homer, whose superiority, as we saw, was based on physical
force, grows, under the hands of Aeschylus, into something akin to the
Jewish Jehovah. The inner experience of the poet drives him inevitably
to this transformation. Born into the great age of Greece, coming to
maturity at the crisis of her fate, he had witnessed with his own eyes,
and assisted with his own hands the defeat of the Persian host at
Marathon. The event struck home to him like a judgment from heaven. The
Nemesis that attends upon human pride, the vengeance that follows crime,
henceforth were the thoughts that haunted and possessed his brain; and
under their influence he evolved for himself out of the popular idea of
Zeus the conception of a God of justice who marks and avenges crime.
Read for example the following passage from the "Agamemnon" and contrast
it with the lines of Homer quoted on page 42. Nothing could illustrate
more strikingly the transformation that could be effected, under the
conditions of the Greek religion, in the whole conception of the divine
power by one whose conscious intention, nevertheless, was not to
innovate but to conserve.

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

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


Section 15. Metaphysical Criticism.

While thus, on the one hand, the Greek religion by its inner evolution,
was tending to destroy itself, on the other hand it was threatened from
without by the attack of what we should call the "scientific spirit." A
system so frankly anthropomorphic was bound to be weak on the
speculative side. Its appeal, as we have seen, was rather to the
imagination than to the intellect, by the presentation of a series of
beautiful images, whose contemplation might offer to the mind if not
satisfaction, at least acquiescence and repose. A Greek who was not too
inquisitive was thus enabled to move through the calendar of splendid
festivals and fasts, charmed by the beauty of the ritual, inspired by
the chorus and the dance, and drawing from the familiar legends the
moral and aesthetic significance with which he had been accustomed from
his boyhood to connect them, but without ever raising the question, Is
all this true? Does it really account for the existence and nature of
the world? Once, however, the spell was broken, once the intellect was
aroused, the inadequacy of the popular faith, on the speculative side,
became apparent; and the mind turned aside altogether from religion to
work out its problems on its own lines. We find accordingly, from early
times, physical philosophers in Greece free from all theological
preconceptions, raising from the very beginning the question of the
origin of the world, and offering solutions, various indeed but all
alike in this, that they frankly accept a materialistic basis. One
derives all things from water, another from air, another from fire; one
insists upon unity, another on a plurality of elements; but all alike
reject the supernatural, and proceed on the lines of physical causation.

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

CHORUS OF CLOUDS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing could be more amusing than this passage as a burlesque of the
physical theories of the time; and nothing could better illustrate the
quarrel between science and religion, as it presents itself on the
surface to the plain man. But there is more in the quarrel than appears
at first sight. The real sting of the comedy from which we have quoted
lies in the assumption, adopted throughout the play, that the atheist is
also necessarily anti-social and immoral. The physicist, in the person
of Socrates, is identified with the sophist; on the one hand he is
represented as teaching the theory of material causation, on the other
the art of lying and deceit. The object of Strepsiades in attending the
school is to learn how not to pay his debts; the achievement of his son
is to learn how to dishonour his father. The cult of reason is
identified by the poet with the cult of self-interest; the man who does
not believe in the gods cannot, he implies, believe in the family or the
state.


Section 16. Metaphysical Reconstruction--Plato.

The argument is an old one into whose merits this is not the place to
enter. But one thing is certain, that the sceptical spirit which was
invading religion, was invading also politics and ethics; and that
towards the close of the fifth century before Christ, Greece and in
particular Athens was overrun by philosophers, who not only did not
scruple to question the foundations of social and moral obligation, but
in some cases explicitly taught that there were no foundations at all;
that all law was a convention based on no objective truth; and that the
only valid right was the natural right of the strong to rule. It was
into this chaos of sceptical opinion that Plato was born; and it was the
desire to meet and subdue it that was the motive of his philosophy. Like
Aristophanes, he traced the root of the evil to the decay of religious
belief; and though no one, as we have seen, was more trenchant than he
in his criticism of the popular faith, no one, on the other hand, was
more convinced of the necessity of some form of religion as a basis for
any stable polity. The doctrine of the physicists, he asserts, that the
world is the result of "nature and chance" has immediate and disastrous
effects on the whole structure of social beliefs. The conclusion
inevitably follows that human laws and institutions, like everything
else, are accidental products; that they have no objective validity, no
binding force on the will; and that the only right that has any
intelligible meaning is the right which is identical with might.
[Footnote: See e.g. Plato's "Laws". X. 887.] Against these conclusions
the whole soul of Plato rose in revolt. To reconstruct religion, he was
driven back upon metaphysics; and elaborated at last the system which
from his day to our own has not ceased to perplex and fascinate the
world, and whose rare and radiant combination of gifts, speculative,
artistic, and religious, marks the highest reach of the genius of the
Greeks, and perhaps of mankind. To attempt an analysis of that system
would lead us far from our present task. All that concerns us here, is
its religious significance; and of that, all we can note is that Plato,
the deepest thinker of the Greeks, was also among the farthest removed
from the popular faith. The principle from which he derives the World is
the absolute Good, or God, of whose ideas the phenomena of sense are
imperfect copies. To the divine intelligence man by virtue of his reason
is akin. But the reason in him has fallen into bondage of the flesh; and
it is the task of his life on earth, or rather of a series of lives (for
Plato believed in successive re-incarnations), to deliver this diviner
element of his soul, and set it free to re-unite with God.

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


Section 17. Summary.

At this point, where religion passes into philosophy, the discussion
which has occupied the present chapter must close. So far it was
necessary to proceed, in order to show how wide was the range of the
religious consciousness of the Greeks, and through how many points of
view it passed in the course of its evolution. But its development was
away from the Greek and towards the Christian; and it will therefore be
desirable, in conclusion, to fix once more in our minds that central and
primary phase of the Greek religion under the influence of which their
civilisation was formed into a character definite and distinct in the
history of the world. This phase will be the one which underlay and was
reflected in the actual cult and institutions of Greece and must
therefore be regarded not as a product of critical and self-conscious
thought, but as an imaginative way of conceiving the world stamped as it
were passively on the mind by the whole course of concrete experience.
Of its character we have attempted to give some kind of account in the
earlier part of this chapter, and we have now only to summarise what was
there said.

The Greek religion, then, as we saw, in this its characteristic phase,
involved a belief in a number of deities who on the one hand were
personifications of the powers of nature and of the human soul, on the
other the founders and sustainers of civil society. To the operations of
these beings the whole of experience was referred, and that, not merely
in an abstract and unintelligible way, as when we say that the world was
created by God, but in a quite precise and definite sense, the action of
the gods being conceived to be the same in kind as that of man,
proceeding from similar motives, directed to similar ends, and
accomplished very largely by similar, though much superior means. By
virtue of this uncritical and unreflective mode of apprehension the
Greeks, we said, were made at home in the world. Their religion suffused
and transformed the facts both of nature and of society, interpreting
what would otherwise have been unintelligible by the idea of an activity
which they could understand because it was one which they were
constantly exercising themselves. Being thus supplied with a general
explanation of the world, they could put aside the question of its
origin and end, and devote themselves freely and fully to the art of
living, unhampered by scruples and doubts as to the nature of life.
Consciousness similar to their own was the ultimate fact; and there was
nothing therefore with which they might not form intelligible and
harmonious relations.

And as on the side of metaphysics they were delivered from the
perplexities of speculation, so on the side of ethics they were
undisturbed by the perplexities of conscience. Their religion, it is
true, had a bearing on their conduct, but a bearing, as we saw, external
and mechanical. If they sinned they might be punished directly by
physical evil; and from this evil religion might redeem them by the
appropriate ceremonies of purgation. But on the other hand they were not
conscious of a spiritual relation to God, of sin as an alienation from
the divine power and repentance as the means of restoration to grace.
The pangs of conscience, the fears and hopes, the triumph and despair of
the soul which were the preoccupations of the Puritan, were phenomena
unknown to the ancient Greek. He lived and acted undisturbed by
scrupulous introspection; and the function of his religion was rather to
quiet the conscience by ritual than to excite it by admonition and
reproof.

From both these points of view, the metaphysical and the ethical, the
Greeks were brought by their religion into harmony with the world.
Neither the perplexities of the intellect nor the scruples of the
conscience intervened to hamper their free activity. Their life was
simple, straightforward and clear; and their consciousness directed
outwards upon the world, not perplexedly absorbed in the contemplation
of itself.

On the other hand, this harmony which was the essence of the Greek
civilisation, was a temporary compromise, not a final solution. It
depended on presumptions of the imagination, not on convictions of the
intellect; and as we have seen, it destroyed itself by the process of
its own development. The beauty, the singleness, and the freedom which
attracts us in the consciousness of the Greek was the result of a
poetical view of the world, which did but anticipate in imagination an
ideal that was not realised in fact or in thought. It depended on the
assumption of anthropomorphic gods, an assumption which could not stand
before the criticism of reason, and either broke down into scepticism,
or was developed into the conception of a single supreme and spiritual
power.

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

Thus the harmony which we have indicated as the characteristic result of
the Greek religion contained none of the conditions of completeness or
finality. For on the one hand there were elements which it was never
able to include; and on the other, its hold even over those which it
embraced was temporary and precarious. The eating of the tree of
knowledge drove the Greeks from their paradise; but the vision of that
Eden continues to haunt the mind of man, not in vain, if it prophesies
in a type the end to which his history moves.




CHAPTER II

THE GREEK VIEW OF THE STATE


Section 1. The Greek State a "City."

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

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

Nor must it be supposed that the size of the Greek state was a mere
accident in its constitution, that it might have been indefinitely
enlarged and yet regained its essential character. On the contrary, the
limitation of size belonged to its very notion. The greatest state, says
Aristotle, is not the one whose population is most numerous; on the
contrary, after a certain limit of increase has been passed, the state
ceases to be a state at all. "Ten men are too few for a city; a hundred
thousand are too many." Not only London, it seems, but every one of our
larger towns, would have been too big for the Greek idea of a state; and
as for the British empire, the very conception of it would have been
impossible to the Greeks.

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


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

First, let us consider the relation of the state to the citizens--that
is to say, to that portion of the community, usually a minority, which
was possessed of full political rights. It is here that we have the key
to that limitation of size which we have seen to be essential to the
idea of the city-state. For, in the Greek view, to be a citizen of a
state did not merely imply the payment of taxes, and the possession of a
vote; it implied a direct and active co-operation in all the functions
of civil and military life. A citizen was normally a soldier, a judge,
and a member of the governing assembly; and all his public duties he
performed not by deputy, but in person. He must be able frequently to
attend the centre of government; hence the limitation of territory. He
must be able to speak and vote in person in the assembly; hence the
limitation of numbers. The idea of representative government never
occurred to the Greeks; but if it had occurred to them, and if they had
adopted it, it would have involved a revolution in their whole
conception of the citizen. Of that conception, direct personal service
was the cardinal point--service in the field as well as in the council;
and to substitute for personal service the mere right to a vote would
have been to destroy the form of the Greek state. Such being the idea
the Greeks had formed, based on their own experience, of the relation of
the citizen to the state, it follows that to them a society so complex
as our own would hardly have answered to the definition of a state at
all. Rather they would have regarded it as a mere congeries of
unsatisfactory human beings, held together, partly by political, partly
by economic compulsion, but lacking that conscious identity of interest
with the community to which they belong which alone constitutes the
citizen. A man whose main pre-occupation should be with his trade or his
profession, and who should only become aware of his corporate relations
when called upon for his rates and taxes--a man, that is to say, in the
position of an ordinary Englishman--would not have seemed to the Greeks
to be a full and proper member of a state. For the state, to them, was
more than a machinery, it was a spiritual bond; and "public life", as we
call it, was not a thing to be taken up and laid aside at pleasure, but
a necessary and essential phase of the existence of a complete man.

This relation of the citizen to the state, as it was conceived by the
Greeks, is sometimes described as though it involved the sacrifice of
the individual to the whole. And in a certain sense, perhaps, this is
true. Aristotle, for instance, declares that no one must suppose he
belongs to himself, but rather that all alike belong to the state; and
Plato, in the construction of his ideal republic, is thinking much less
of the happiness of the individual citizens, than of the symmetry and
beauty of the whole as it might appear to a disinterested observer from
without. Certainly it would have been tedious and irksome to any but his
own ideal philosopher to live under the rule of that perfect polity.
Individual enterprise, bent, and choice is rigorously excluded. Nothing
escapes the net of legislation, from the production of children to the
fashion of houses, clothes, and food. It is absurd, says the ruthless
logic of this mathematician among the poets, for one who would regulate
public life to leave private relations uncontrolled; if there is to be
order at all, it must extend through and through; no moment, no detail
must be withdrawn from the grasp of law. And though in this, Plato, no
doubt, goes far beyond the common sense of the Greeks, yet he is not
building altogether in the air. The republic which he desiderates was
realised, as we shall see, partially at least, in Sparta. So that his
insistence on the all-pervading domination of the state, exaggerated
though it be, is exaggerated on the actual lines of Greek practice, and
may be taken as indicative of a real distinction and even antithesis
between their point of view and that which prevails at present in most
modern states.

But on the other hand such a phrase as the "sacrifice of the individual
to the whole", to this extent at least is misleading, that it
presupposes an opposition between the end of the individual and that of
the State, such as was entirely foreign to the Greek conception. The
best individual, in their view, was also the best citizen; the two
ideals not only were not incompatible, they were almost
indistinguishable. When Aristotle defines a state as "an association of
similar persons for the attainment of the best life possible", he
implies not only that society is the means whereby the individual
attains his ideal, but also that that ideal includes the functions of
public life. The state in his view is not merely the convenient
machinery that raises a man above his animal wants and sets him free to
follow his own devices; it is itself his end, or at least a part of it.
And from this it follows that the regulations of the state were not
regarded by the Greeks--as they are apt to be by modern men--as so many
vexatious, if necessary, restraints on individual liberty; but rather as
the expression of the best and highest nature of the citizen, as the
formula of the conduct which the good man would naturally prescribe to
himself. So that, to get a clear conception of what was at least the
Greek ideal, however imperfectly it may have been attained in practice,
we ought to regard the individual not as sacrificed to, but rather as
realising himself in the whole. We shall thus come nearer to what seems
to have been the point of view not only of Aristotle and of Plato, but
also of the average Greek man.


Section 3. The Greek View of Law.

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

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

In this opposition of Law, as the universal principle, to Nature, as
individual caprice, is implied a tacit identification of Law and
Justice. The identification, of course, is never complete in any state,
and frequently enough is not even approximate. No people were more
conscious of this than the Greeks, none, as we shall see later, pushed
it more vigorously home. But still, the positive conception which lay at
the root of their society was that which finds expression in the passage
we have quoted, and which is stated still more explicitly in the
"Memorabilia" of Xenophon, where that admirable example of the good and
efficient citizen represents his hero Socrates as maintaining, without
hesitation or reserve, that "that which is in accordance with law is
just." The implication, of course, is not that laws cannot be improved,
that they do at any point adequately correspond to justice; but that
justice has an objective and binding validity, and that Law is a serious
and on the whole a successful attempt to embody it in practice. This was
the conviction predominant in the best period of Greece; the conviction
under which her institutions were formed and flourished, and whose
overthrow by the philosophy of a critical age was coincident with, if it
was not the cause of, her decline.


Section 4. Artisans and Slaves.

We have now arrived at a general idea of the nature of the Greek state,
and of its relations to the individual citizen. But there were also
members of the state who were not citizens at all; there was the class
of labourers and traders, who, in some states at least, had no political
rights; and the class of slaves who had nowhere any rights at all. For
in the Greek conception the citizen was an aristocrat. His excellence
was thought to consist in public activity; and to the performance of
public duties he ought therefore to be able to devote the greater part
of his time and energy. But the existence of such a privileged class
involved the existence of a class of producers to support them; and the
producers, by the nature of their calling, be they slave or free, were
excluded from the life of the perfect citizen. They had not the
necessary leisure to devote to public business; neither had they the
opportunity to acquire the mental and physical qualities which would
enable them to transact it worthily. They were therefore regarded by the
Greeks as an inferior class; in some states, in Sparta, for example, and
in Thebes, they were excluded from political rights; and even in Athens,
the most democratic of all the Greek communities, though they were
admitted to the citizenship and enjoyed considerable political
influence, they never appear to have lost the stigma of social
inferiority. And the distinction which was thus more or less definitely
drawn in practice between the citizens proper and the productive class,
was even more emphatically affirmed in theory. Aristotle, the most
balanced of all the Greek thinkers and the best exponent of the normal
trend of their ideas, excludes the class of artisans from the
citizenship of his ideal state on the ground that they are debarred by
their occupation from the characteristic excellence of man. And Plato,
though here as elsewhere he pushes the normal view to excess, yet, in
his insistence on the gulf that separates the citizen from the mechanic
and the trader, is in sympathy with the general current of Greek ideas.
His ideal state is one which depends mainly on agriculture; in which
commerce and exchange are reduced to the smallest possible dimensions;
in which every citizen is a landowner, forbidden to engage in trade; and
in which the productive class is excluded from all political rights. The
obverse then, of the Greek citizen, who realised in the state his
highest life, was an inferior class of producers who realised only the
means of subsistence. But within this class again was a distinction yet
more fundamental--the distinction between free men and slaves. In the
majority of the Greek states the slaves were the greater part of the
population; in Athens, to take an extreme case, at the close of the
fourth century, they are estimated at 400,000, to 100,000 citizens. They
were employed not only in domestic service, but on the fields, in
factories and in mines, and performed, in short, a considerable part of
the productive labour in the state. A whole large section, then, of the
producers in ancient Greece had no social or political rights at all.
They existed simply to maintain the aristocracy of citizens, for whom
and in whom the state had its being. Nor was this state of things in the
least repugnant to the average Greek mind. Nothing is more curious to
the modern man than the temper in which Aristotle approaches this theme.
Without surprise or indignation, but in the tone of an impartial,
scientific inquirer, he asks himself the question whether slavery is
natural, and answers it in the affirmative. For, he argues, though in
any particular case, owing to the uncertain chances of fortune and war,
the wrong person may happen to be enslaved, yet, broadly speaking, the
general truth remains, that there are some men so inferior  to others
that they ought to be despotically governed, by the same right and for
the same good end that the body ought to be governed by the soul. Such
men, he maintains, are slaves by nature; and it is as much to their
interest to be ruled as it is to their masters' interest to rule them.
To this class belong, for example, all who are naturally incapable of
any but physical activity. These should be regarded as detachable limbs,
so to speak, of the man who owns them, instruments of his will, like
hands and feet; or, to use Aristotle's own phrase, "the slave is a tool
with life in it, and the tool a lifeless slave."

The relation between master and slave thus frankly conceived by the
Greeks, did not necessarily imply, though it was quite compatible with,
brutality of treatment. The slave might be badly treated, no doubt, and
very frequently was, for his master had almost absolute control over
him, life and limb; but, as we should expect, it was clearly recognised
by the best Greeks that the treatment should be genial and humane.
"There is a certain mutual profit and kindness," says Aristotle,
"between master and slave, in all cases where the relation is natural,
not merely imposed from without by convention or force." [Footnote:
Arist. Pol. I. 7. 1255 b 12] And Plato insists on the duty of neither
insulting nor outraging a slave, but treating him rather with even
greater fairness than if he were in a position of equality.

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

It seems then that the distinction between the Greek and the modern
point of view is not so profound or so final as it appears at first
sight. Still, the distinction, broadly speaking, is there. The Greeks,
on the whole, were quite content to sacrifice the majority to the
minority. Their position, as we said at the outset, was fundamentally
aristocratic; they exaggerated rather than minimised the distinctions
between men--between the Greek and the barbarian, the freeman and the
slave, the gentleman and the artisan--regarding them as natural and
fundamental, not as the casual product of circumstances. The "equality"
which they sought in a well-ordered state was proportional not
arithmetical--the attribution to each of his peculiar right, not of
equal rights to all. Some were born to rule, others to serve; some to be
ends, others to be means; and the problem to be solved was not how to
obliterate these varieties of tone, but how to compose them into an
ordered harmony.

In a modern state, on the other hand, though class distinctions are
clearly enough marked, yet the point of view from which they are
regarded is fundamentally different. They are attributed rather to
accidents of fortune than to varieties of nature. The artisan, for
example, ranks no doubt lower than the professional man; but no one
maintains that he is a different kind of being, incapable by nature, as
Aristotle asserts, of the characteristic excellence of man. The
distinction admitted is rather one of wealth than of natural calling,
and may be obliterated by ability and good luck. Neither in theory nor
in practice does the modern state recognise any such gulf as that which,
in ancient Greece, separated the freeman from the slave, or the citizen
from the non-citizen.


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

The source of this divergence of view must be sought in the whole
circumstances and character of the Greek states. Founded in the
beginning by conquest, many of them still retained, in their internal
structure, the marks of their violent origin. The citizens, for example,
of Sparta and of Crete, were practically military garrisons, settled in
the midst of a hostile population. These were extreme cases; and
elsewhere, no doubt, the distinction between the conquerors and the
conquered had disappeared. Still, it had sufficed to mould the
conception and ideal of the citizen as a member of a privileged and
superior class, whose whole energies were devoted to maintaining, by
council and war, not only the prosperity, but the very existence of the
state. The original citizen, moreover, would be an owner of land, which
would be tilled for him by a subject class. Productive labour would be
stamped, from the outset, with the stigma of inferiority; commerce would
grow up, if at all, outside the limits of the landed aristocracy, and
would have a struggle to win for itself any degree of social and
political recognition. Such were the conditions that produced the Greek
conception of the citizen. In some states, such as Sparta, they
continued practically unchanged throughout the best period of Greek
history; in others, such as Athens, they were modified by the growth of
a commercial population, and where that was the case the conception of
the citizen was modified too, and the whole polity assumed a democratic
character. Yet never, as we have seen, even in the most democratic
states, was the modern conception of equality admitted. For, in the
first place, the institution of slavery persisted, to stamp the mass of
producers as an inferior caste; and in the second place, trade, even in
the states where it was most developed, hardly attained a preponderating
influence. The ancient state was and remained primarily military. The
great industrial questions which agitate modern states either did not
exist at all in Greece, or assumed so simple a form that they did not
rise to the surface of political life. [Footnote: There was, of course,
the general opposition between rich and poor (see below). But not those
infinitely complex relations which are the problems of modern
statesmanship.] How curious it is, for example, from the modern point of
view, to find Plato, a citizen of the most important trading centre of
Greece, dismissing in the following brief sentence the whole commercial
legislation of his ideal state:

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

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

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

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

We have seen that the state, in the Greek view, must be so limited, both
in territory and population, that all its citizens might be able to
participate in person in its government and defence; that it was based
on fundamental class distinctions separating sharply the citizen from
the non-citizen, and the slave from the free; that its end and purpose
was that all-absorbing corporate activity in which the citizen found the
highest expression of himself; and that to that end the inferior classes
were regarded as mere means--a point of view which finds its completest
expression in the institution of slavery.


Section 6. Forms of Government in the Greek State.

While, however, this was the general idea of the Greek state, it would
be a mistake to suppose that it was everywhere embodied in a single
permanent form of polity. On the contrary, the majority of the states in
Greece were in a constant state of flux; revolution succeeded revolution
with startling rapidity; and in place of a single fixed type what we
really get is a constant transition from one variety to another. The
general account we have given ought therefore to be regarded only as a
kind of limiting formula, embracing within its range a number of
polities distinct and even opposed in character. Of these polities
Aristotle, whose work is based on an examination of all the existing
states of Greece, recognises three main varieties: government by the
one, government by the few, and government by the many; and each of
these is subdivided into two forms, one good, where the government has
regard to the well-being of the whole, the other bad, where it has
regard only to the well-being of those who govern. The result is six
forms, of which three are good, monarchy, aristocracy, and what he calls
a "polity" par excellence; three bad, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.
Of all these forms we have examples in Greek history, and indeed can
roughly trace a tendency of the state to evolve through the series of
them. But by far the most important, in the historical period, are the
two forms known as Oligarchy and Democracy; and the reason of their
importance is that they corresponded roughly to government by the rich
and government by the poor. "Rich and poor," says Aristotle, "are the
really antagonistic members of a state. The result is that the character
of all existing polities is determined by the predominance of one or
other of these classes, and it is the common opinion that there are two
polities and two only, viz., Democracy and Oligarchy." [Footnote: Arist.
Pol. VI. (IV) 1291 b8.--Translation by Welldon.] In other words, the
social distinction between rich and poor was exaggerated in Greece into
political antagonism. In every state there was an oligarchic and a
democratic faction; and so fierce was the opposition between them, that
we may almost say that every Greek city was in a chronic state of civil
war, having become, as Plato puts it, not one city but two, "one
comprising the rich and the other the poor, who reside together on the
same ground, and are always plotting against one another." [Footnote:
Plat. Rep. viii. 551--Translation by Davies and Vaughan]


Section 7. Faction and Anarchy.

This internal schism which ran through almost every state, came to a
head in the great Peloponnesian war which divided Greece at the close of
the fifth century, and in which Athens and Sparta, the two chief
combatants, represented respectively the democratic and the oligarchic
principles. Each appealed to the kindred faction in the states that were
opposed to them; and every city was divided against itself, the party
that was "out" for the moment plotting with the foreign foe to overthrow
the party that was "in." Thus the general Greek conception of the
ordered state was so far from being realised in practice that probably
at no time in the history of the civilised world has anarchy more
complete and cynical prevailed.

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

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

"When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried
the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined to outdo
the report of all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of their
enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words had
no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they
thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent
delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly
weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the
true quality of a man. A conspirator who wanted to be safe was a
recreant in disguise. The lover of violence was always trusted, and his
opponent suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was deemed knowing, but a
still greater master in craft was he who detected one. On the other
hand, he who plotted from the first to have nothing to do with plots was
a breaker-up of parties and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a
word, he who could outstrip another in a bad action was applauded, and
so was he who encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it. The tie of
party was stronger than the tie of blood, because a partisan was more
ready to dare without asking why (for party associations are not based
upon any established law, nor do they seek the public good; they are
formed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest). The seal of good
faith was not divine law, but fellowship in crime. If an enemy when he
was in the ascendant offered fair words, the opposite party received
them, not in a generous spirit, but by a jealous watchfulness of his
actions. Revenge was dearer than self-preservation. Any agreements sworn
to by either party, when they could do nothing else, were binding as
long as both were powerless. But he who on a favourable opportunity
first took courage and struck at his enemy when he saw him off his
guard, had greater pleasure in a perfidious than he would have had in an
open act of revenge; he congratulated himself that he had taken the
safer course, and also that he had overreached his enemy and gained the
prize of superior ability. In general the dishonest more easily gain
credit for cleverness than the simple for goodness; men take a pride in
the one, but are ashamed of the other.

"The cause of all these evils was the love of power originating in
avarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them
when men are fairly embarked in a contest. For the leaders on either
side used specious names, the one party professing to uphold the
constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of an
aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they
were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome
each other, they committed the most monstrous crimes; yet even these
were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges which they pursued to
the very utmost, neither party observing any definite limits either of
justice or public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of the
moment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or
grasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the
impatience of party spirit. Neither faction cared for religion; but any
fair pretence which succeeded in effecting some odious purpose was
greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a prey
to both; either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men were
jealous of their surviving.

"Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Hellas. The
simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to
scorn and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere
prevailed; for there was no word binding enough, nor oath terrible
enough to reconcile enemies. Each man was strong only in the conviction
that nothing was secure; he must look to his own safety, and could not
afford to trust others. Inferior intellects generally succeeded best.
For aware of their own deficiencies, and fearing the capacities of their
opponents, for whom they were no match in powers of speech, and whose
subtle wits were likely to anticipate them in contriving evil, they
struck boldly and at once. But the cleverer sort, presuming in their
arrogance that they would be aware in time, and disdaining to act when
they could think, were taken off their guard and easily destroyed."
[Footnote: Thuc. iii. 82.--Translated by Jowett.]

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

Such is the view of the political condition of Greece given to us by a
contemporary observer towards the close of the fifth century, and it is
a curious comment on the Greek idea of the state. That idea, as we saw,
was an ordered inequality, political as well as social; and in certain
states, and notably in Sparta, it was successfully embodied in a stable
form. But in the majority of the Greek states it never attained to more
than a fluctuating and temporary realisation. The inherent contradiction
was too extreme for the attempted reconciliation; the inequalities
refused to blend in a harmony of divergent tones but asserted themselves
in the dissonance of civil war.


Section 8. Property and the Communistic Ideal.

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

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

We see then that it was the underlying question of property that infused
so strong a rancour into the party struggles of Greece. From the very
earliest period, in fact, we find it to have been the case that
political revolution was prompted by economic causes. Debt was the main
factor of the crisis which led to the legislation of Solon; and a re-
division of the land was one of the measures attributed to Lycurgus.
[Footnote: I have not thought it necessary for my purpose, here or
elsewhere, to discuss the authenticity of the statements made by Greek
authors about Lycurgus.] As population increased, and, in the maritime
states, commerce and trade developed, the problem of poverty became
increasingly acute; and though it was partially met by the emigration of
the surplus population to colonies, yet in the fifth and fourth
centuries we find it prominent and pressing both in practical politics
and in speculation. Nothing can illustrate better how familiar the topic
was, and to what free theorising it had led, than the passages in which
it is treated in the comedies of Aristophanes. Here for example, is an
extract from the "Ecclesiazusae" which it may be worth while to insert
as a contribution to an argument that belongs to every age.

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

BLEPSYRUS. How communism?

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

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

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

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

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

BLEPS. Why not?

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

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

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

BLEPS. Who will do the field work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

BYSTANDER. Just my idea!

PRAX. Why should there be any?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRAX. Not if you sleep at home!

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

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

BLEPS. And will there be no more gambling?

PRAX. What will there be to play for?

BLEPS. And how about house accommodation?

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

The "social problem," then, had clearly arisen in ancient Greece, though
no doubt in an infinitely simpler form than that in which it is
presented to ourselves; and it might perhaps have been expected that the
Greeks, with their notion of the supremacy of the state, would have
adopted some drastic public measure to meet it. And, in fact, in the
earlier period of their history, as has been indicated above, we do find
sweeping revolutions effected in the distribution of property. In
Athens, Solon abolished debt, either in whole or part, by reducing the
rate of interest and depreciating the currency; and in Sparta Lycurgus
is said to have resumed the whole of the land for the state, and
redivided it equally among the citizens. We have also traces of laws
existing in other states to regulate in the interests of equality the
possession and transfer of land. But it does not appear that any attempt
was made in any state permanently to control by public authority the
production and distribution of wealth. Meantime, however, the problem of
social inequality was exercising the minds of political theorists; and
we have notice of various schemes for an ideal polity framed upon
communistic principles. Of these the most important, and the only one
preserved to us, is the celebrated "Republic" of Plato; and never, it
may be safely asserted, was a plan of society framed so consistent,
harmonious and beautiful in itself, or so indifferent to the actual
capacities of mankind. Following out what we have already indicated as
the natural drift of Greek ideas, the philosopher separates off on the
one hand the productive class, who are to have no political rights; and
on the other the class of soldiers and governors. It is the latter alone
with whom he seriously concerns himself; and the scheme he draws up for
them is uncompromisingly communistic. After being purged, by an
elaborate education, of all the egoistic passions, they are to live
together, having all things in common, devoted heart and soul to the
public good, and guiltless even of a desire for any private possession
or advantage of their own. "In the first place, no one," says Plato,
"should possess any private property, if it can possibly be avoided;
secondly, no one should have a dwelling or store house into which all
who please may not enter; whatever necessaries are required by temperate
and courageous men, who are trained to war, they should receive by
regular appointment from their fellow-citizens, as wages for their
services, and the amount should be such as to leave neither a surplus on
the year's consumption nor a deficit; and they should attend common
messes and live together as men do in a camp: as for gold and silver, we
must tell them that they are in perpetual possession of a divine species
of the precious metals placed in their souls by the gods themselves, and
therefore have no need of the earthly one; that in fact it would be
profanation to pollute their spiritual riches by mixing them with the
possession of mortal gold, because the world's coinage has been the
cause of countless impieties, whereas theirs is undefiled: therefore to
them, as distinguished from the rest of the people, it is forbidden to
handle or touch gold and silver, or enter under the same roof with them,
or to wear them in their dresses, or to drink out of the precious
metals. If they follow these rules, they will be safe themselves and the
saviours of the city: but whenever they come to possess lands, and
houses, and money of their own, they will be householders and
cultivators instead of guardians, and will become hostile masters of
their fellow-citizens rather than their allies; and so they will spend
their whole lives, hating and hated, plotting and plotted against,
standing in more frequent and intense alarm of their enemies at home
than of their enemies abroad; by which time they and the rest of the
city will be running on the very brink of ruin." [Footnote: Plato, Rep.
III. 416.--Translation by Davies and Vaughan.]

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

Such views as these, it may be noted, interesting though they be, as
illustrating how keenly the thinkers of ancient Greece had realised the
drawbacks of private property, have but the slightest bearing on the
conditions of our own time. The complexity and extent of modern industry
have given rise to quite new problems, and quite new schemes for their
solution; and especially have forced into prominence the point of view
of the producers themselves. To Greek thinkers it was natural to
approach the question of property from the side of the governing class
or of the state as a whole. The communism of Plato, for example, applied
only to the "guardians" and soldiers, and not to the productive class on
whom they depended; and so completely was he pre-occupied with the
former to the exclusion of the latter, that he dismisses in a single
sentence, as unworthy the legislator's detailed attention, the whole
apparatus of labour and exchange. To regard the "working-class" as the
most important section of the community, to substitute for the moral or
political the economic standpoint, and to conceive society merely as a
machine for the production and distribution of wealth, would have been
impossible to an ancient Greek. Partly by the simplicity of the economic
side of the society with which he was acquainted, partly by the habit of
regarding the labouring class as a mere means to the maintenance of the
rest, he was led, even when he had to deal with the problem of poverty
and wealth, to regard it rather from the point of view of the stability
and efficiency of the state, than from that of the welfare of the
producers themselves. The modern attitude is radically different; a
revolution has been effected both in the conditions of industry and in
the way in which they are regarded; and the practice and the speculation
of the Greek city-states have for us an interest which, great as it is,
is philosophic rather than practical.


Section 9. Sparta.

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

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

The Spartan state was composed of a small body of citizens--the
Spartiatae or Spartans proper-encamped in the midst of a hostile
population to whom they allowed no political rights and by whose labour
they were supplied with the necessaries of life. The distinction between
the citizen class on the one hand and the productive class on the other
was thus as clearly and sharply drawn as possible. It was even
exaggerated; for the citizens were a band of conquerors, the productive
class a subject race, perpetually on the verge of insurrection and only
kept in restraint by such measures as secret assassination. The result
was to draw together the small band of Spartiatae into a discipline so
rigorous and close that under it everything was sacrificed to the
necessity of self-preservation; and the bare maintenance of the state
became the end for which every individual was born, and lived, and died.
This discipline, according to tradition, had been devised by a single
legislator, Lycurgus, and it was maintained intact for several
centuries. Its main features may be summarised as follows.

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

A healthy stock having been thus provided as a basis, every attention
was devoted to its appropriate training. The infants were encouraged
from the beginning in the free use of their limbs, unhampered by
swaddling-clothes, and were accustomed to endure without fear darkness
and solitude, and to cure themselves of peevishness and crying. At the
age of seven the boys were taken away from the charge of their parents,
and put under the superintendence of a public official. Their education,
on the intellectual side, was slight enough, comprising only such
rudiments as reading and writing; but on the moral side it was stringent
and severe. Gathered into groups under the direction of elder youths--
"monitors" we might call them--they were trained to a discipline of iron
endurance. One garment served them for the whole year; they went without
shoes, and slept on beds of rushes plucked with their own hands. Their
food was simple, and often enough they had to go without it. Every
moment of the day they were under inspection and supervision, for it was
the privilege and the duty of every citizen to admonish and punish not
only his own but other people's children. At supper they waited at table
on their elders, answered their questions and endured their jests. In
the streets they were taught to walk in silence, their hands folded in
their cloaks, their eyes cast down, their heads never turning to right
or left. Their gymnastic and military training was incessant; wherever
they met, we are told, they began to box; under the condition, however,
that they were bound to separate at the command of any bystander. To
accustom them early to the hardships of a campaign, they were taught to
steal their food from the mess-tables of their elders; if they were
detected they were beaten for their clumsiness, and went without their
dinner. Nothing was omitted, on the moral or physical side, to make them
efficient members of a military state. Nor was the discipline relaxed
when they reached years of maturity. For, in fact, the whole city was a
camp. Family life was obliterated by public activity. The men dined
together in messes, rich and poor alike, sharing the same coarse and
simple food. Servants, dogs, and horses, were regarded as common
property. Luxury was strictly forbidden. The only currency in
circulation was of iron, so cumbrous that it was impossible to
accumulate or conceal it. The houses were as simple as possible, the
roofs shaped only with the axe, and the doors with the saw; the
furniture and fittings corresponded, plain but perfectly made. The
nature of the currency practically prohibited commerce, and no citizen
was allowed to be engaged in any mechanical trade. Agriculture was the
main industry, and every Spartan had, or was supposed to have, a landed
estate, cultivated by serfs who paid him a yearly rent. In complete
accordance with the Greek ideal, it was a society of soldier-citizens,
supported by an inferior productive class. In illustration of this point
the following curious anecdote may be quoted from Plutarch. During one
of the wars in which Sparta and her allies were engaged, the allies
complained that they, who were the majority of the army, had been forced
into a quarrel which concerned nobody but the Spartans. Whereupon
Agesilaus, the Spartan king, "devised this expedient to show the allies
were not the greater number. He gave orders that all the allies, of
whatever country, should sit down promiscuously on one side, and all the
Lacedaemonians on the other: which being done, he commanded a herald to
proclaim, that all the potters of both divisions should stand out; then
all the blacksmiths; then all the masons; next the carpenters; and so he
went through all the handicrafts. By this time almost all the allies
were risen, but of the Lacedaemonians not a man, they being by law
forbidden to learn any mechanical business; and now Agesilaus laughed
and said, "You see, my friends, how many more soldiers we send out than
you do." [Footnote: Plut. Agesilaus.--Translation by Clough.]

And certainly, so far as its immediate ends were concerned, this society
of soldier-citizens was singularly successful. The courage and
efficiency of Spartan troops were notorious, and were maintained indeed
not only by the training we have described, but by social penalties
attached to cowardice. A man who had disgraced himself in battle was a
pariah in his native land. No one would eat with him, no one would
wrestle with him; in the dance he must take the lowest place; he must
give the wall at meetings in the street, and resign his seat even to
younger men; he must dress and bear himself humbly, under penalty of
blows, and suffer the reproaches of women and of boys. Death plainly
would be preferable to such a life; and we are not surprised to hear
that the discipline and valour of Spartan troops was celebrated far and
wide. Here is a description of them, given by one of themselves to the
Persian king when he was projecting the invasion of Greece:

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

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

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

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

The Spartan state, in fact, by virtue of that excellence which was also
its defect--the specialising of the individual on the side of discipline
and rule--carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. The
tendencies which Lycurgus had endeavoured to repress by external
regulation reasserted themselves in his despite. He had intended once
for all both to limit and to equalise private property; but already as
early as the fifth century Spartans had accumulated gold which they
deposited in temples in foreign states; the land fell, by inheritance
and gift, into the hands of a small minority; the number of the citizens
was reduced, not only by war, but by the disfranchisement attending
inability to contribute to the common mess-tables; till at last we find
no more than 700 Spartan families, and of these no more than 100
possessing estates in land.

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


Section 10. Athens.

In the institutions of Sparta we see, carried to its furthest point, one
side of the complex Greek nature--their capacity for discipline and law.
Athens, the home of a different stock, gives us the other extreme--their
capacity for rich and spontaneous individual development. To pass from
Sparta to Athens, is to pass from a barracks to a playing-field. All the
beauty, all the grace, all the joy of Greece; all that chains the desire
of mankind, with a yearning that is never stilled, to that one golden
moment in the past, whose fair and balanced interplay of perfect flesh
and soul no later gains of thought can compensate, centres about that
bright and stately city of romance, the home of Pericles and all the
arts, whence from generation to generation has streamed upon ages less
illustrious an influence at once the sanest and the most inspired of all
that have shaped the secular history of the world. Girt by mountain and
sea, by haunted fountain and sacred grove, shaped and adorned by the
master hands of Pheidias and Polygnotus and filled with the breath of
passion and song by Euripides and Plato, Athens, famed alike for the
legended deeds of heroes and gods and for the feats of her human sons in
council, art, and war, is a name, to those who have felt her spell, more
familiar and more dear than any of the few that mark with gold the
sombre scroll of history. And still across the years we feel the throb
of the glorious verse that broke in praise of his native land from the
lips of Euripides:


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

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

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

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

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

The qualities here set forth by Thucydides as characteristic of the
Athenians, were partly the cause and partly the effect of their
political constitution. The history of Athens, indeed, is the very
antithesis to that of Sparta. In place of a type fixed at a stroke and
enduring for centuries, she presents a series of transitions through the
whole range of polities, to end at last in a democracy so extreme that
it refuses to be included within the limits of the general formula of
the Greek state.

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

Had the citizens been a class apart, as was the case in Sparta, had they
been subjected from the cradle to a similar discipline and training,
forbidden to engage in any trade or business, and consecrated to the
service of the state, there would have been nothing surprising in this
uncompromising assertion of equality. But in Athens the citizenship was
extended to every rank and calling; the poor man jostled the rich, the
shopman the aristocrat, in the Assembly; cobblers, carpenters, smiths,
farmers, merchants, and retail traders met together with the ancient
landed gentry, to debate and conclude on national affairs; and it was
from such varied elements as these that the lot impartially chose the
officials of the law, the revenue, the police, the highways, the
markets, and the ports, as well as the jurors at whose mercy stood
reputation, fortune, and life. The consequence was that in Athens, at
least in the later period of her history, the middle and lower classes
tended to monopolise political power. Of the popular leaders, Cleon, the
most notorious, was a tanner; another was a baker, another a cattle-
dealer. Influence belonged to those who had the gift of leading the
mass; and in that competition the man of tongue, of energy, and of
resource, was more than a match for the aristocrat of birth and
intellect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have here an illustration, one among many that might be given, of the
political equality that prevailed in Athens. It shows us how completely
that distinction between the military or governing, and the productive
class, which belonged to the normal Greek conception of the state, had
been broken down, on the side at least of privilege and right, though
not on that of social estimation, in this most democratic of the ancient
states. Politically, the Athenian trader and the Athenian artisan was
the equal of the aristocrat of purest blood; and so far the government
of Athens was a genuine democracy.

But so far only. For in Athens, as in every Greek state, the greater
part of the population was unfree; and the government which was a
democracy from the point of view of the freeman, was an oligarchy from
the point of view of the slave. For the slaves, by the nature of their
position, had no political rights; and they were more than half of the
population. It is noticeable, however, that the freedom and
individuality which was characteristic of the Athenian citizen, appears
to have reacted favourably on the position of the slaves. Not only had
they, to a certain extent, the protection of the law against the worst
excesses of their masters, but they were allowed a license of bearing
and costume which would not have been tolerated in any other state. A
contemporary writer notes that in dress and general appearance Athenian
slaves were not to be distinguished from citizens; that they were
permitted perfect freedom of speech; and that it was open to them to
acquire a fortune and to live in ease and luxury. In Sparta, he says,
the slave stands in fear of the freeman, but in Athens this is not the
case; and certainly the bearing of the slaves introduced into the
Athenian comedy does not indicate any undue subservience. Slavery at the
best is an undemocratic institution; but in Athens it appears to have
been made as democratic as its nature would admit.

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

"Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the
institutions of others. We do not copy our neighbours, but are an
example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the
administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while
the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes,
the claim of excellence is also recognised; and when a citizen is in any
way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a
matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty a
bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his
condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our
private intercourse we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with
our neighbour if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at
him, which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus
unconstrained in our private intercourse, a spirit of reverence pervades
our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for
authority and for the laws, having an especial regard for those which
are ordained for the protection of the injured, as well as for those
unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation
of the general sentiment.

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

"Then again, our military training is in many respects superior to that
of our adversaries. Our city is thrown open to the world, and we never
expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything of
which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him. We rely not
upon management and trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands. And in
the matter of education, whereas they from early youth are always
undergoing laborious exercises which are to make them brave, we live at
ease, and yet are ready to face the perils which they face.

"If then we prefer to meet danger with a light heart but without
laborious training, and with a courage which is gained by habit and not
enforced by law, are we not greatly the gainers? Since we do not
anticipate the pain, although when the hour comes, we can be as brave as
those who never allow themselves to rest; and thus too our city is
equally admirable in peace and in war. For we are lovers of the
beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without
loss of manliness.

"Wealth we employ, not for talk and ostentation, but when there is a real
use for it. To avow poverty with us is no disgrace; the true disgrace is
in doing nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect the
state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us
who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone
regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless,
but as a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are all
sound judges of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in our
opinion, not discussion but the want of that knowledge which is gained
by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of
thinking before we act, and of acting too, whereas other men are
courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection. And they are
surely to be esteemed the bravest spirits who have the clearest sense
both of the pains and pleasures of life, but do not on that account
shrink from danger.

"To sum up, I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the
individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of
adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost
versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth and
fact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which these
qualities have raised the state. For in the hour of trial Athens alone
among her contemporaries is superior to the report of her. No enemy who
comes against her is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the
hands of such a city; no subject complains that his masters are unworthy
of him. And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there are
mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and
of succeeding ages: we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any
other panegyrist, whose poetry may please for the moment, although his
representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we have
compelled every land, every sea, to open a path for our valour, and have
everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of our
enmity." [Footnote: Thuc. ii. 37.--Translated by Jowett.]

An impression so superb as this it is almost a pity to mar with the
inevitable complement of disaster and decay. But our account of the
Athenian polity would be misleading and incomplete if we did not
indicate how the idea of equality, on which it turned, defeated itself,
as did, in Sparta, the complementary idea of order, by the excesses of
its own development. Already before the close of the fifth century, and
with reiterated emphasis in the earlier decades of the fourth, we hear
from poets and orators praise of a glorious past that is dead, and
denunciatio

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