Chapter III

Were it not for an original propriety in the distinction, it would be better not to speak at all of “Classical” and “Romantic.” This seems clearly to be the fault of modern criticism, which has hidden the path under so deep a fall of many-coloured leaves, that now one must spend a deal of time merely in sweeping them up. It is annoying how inapt are current terms of criticism to express the essence of ancient literature. I have hinted that it might almost be expressed in the word “realism,” and at once I am checked by the reflection that realism in modern speech appears to mean anything you like. How, then, is a man to avoid being misunderstood? But he has to take the risk; and on the whole it will be safer for him to grasp this runaway by the hair than to sow more definitions in a soil already exhausted.

Greek literature is realistic in the sense that it aims at producing the effect of reality, not by the accumulation of startling details—which perhaps is what is usually meant in these days by realism—but by a method of its own. Greek literature is marked by a unique sincerity, or veracity, or candour, equally foreign to violence and to sentimentality—a bitter man might say, equally foreign to what we now call realism and to what we now call idealism. So profound is this truthfulness that we (who cry out daily for a resolute fidelity to fact in our writers) have not yet sounded it. It needs a long plummet. So many of us have come to imagine that the truth of a situation is not apparent except in flashes of lightning—preferably red lightning—which the Greeks thought distorting. We think we are candid, and we are not so very candid. I could never be one of those fanatical champions of antiquity to whom the modern is merely the enemy. Their position is so pathetically untenable that one can only with a sigh busy oneself with something that really matters. But, however modern I may feel, I cannot get myself to believe that we attain so perfect a truthfulness as the Greeks. We have written volumes about the “Classical Ideal,” and we are apt to contrast “Hellenic Idealism” with our uncompromising modern “Realism” and “Naturalism.” And all the time the Greeks have had a truer realism than we.

For instance, we have of late almost made a speciality of wounds and death. You could not say this of any ancient writer. Curiously enough, you might say it with less impropriety of Homer than of any other. A warrior, he says, was pierced to the heart by a spear, _and the throbbing of the heart made also the butt of the spear to quiver_. That gives you a pretty satisfactory shiver. Menelaos smote Peisandros _above the root of the nose; and the bones cracked, and his eyes dropped bloody in the dust of the ground at his feet_. This is how Peneleos treated Ilioneus. _He wounded him under the eyebrow where the eye is embedded and forced out the ball, and the spear went clean through the eye and through the muscle behind, and the wounded man crouched down, spreading out his hands; but Peneleos drawing his sharp sword smote his neck in the midst and dashed the head on the ground, helmet and all; and the heavy spear was still in the eye, and he raised up the head like a poppy._ I suspect your modern realist of envying that image of the bloody head stuck “through the eye” on a spear and looking like a “poppy” or a “poppy-head” on its stalk. Another unfortunate fighter was hit _down the mouth_ with a spear, which penetrated _under the brain and broke the white bones; and the teeth were shaken out and both his eyes were filled with blood, and with a gape he sent the blood gushing up his mouth and down his nostrils_. The youngest son of King Priam was wounded by Achilles _beside the navel_, and so _dropped moaning on his knees_ and _clutched his entrails to him with his hands_—a passage remembered by Pater.

From it and the others it may be seen that Homer, when he likes, can be as grisly as Mr. Sassoon. But they are not typical of Homer, still less of the ancient Greek writers in general. It is not their way to obtrude details. Their aim is to give you the whole situation, and to give it truly. Their method is to select the significant, rather than the merely striking, details. Such a theory and method are best entitled, on reflection, to the name of realism. Kebriones, the charioteer in Homer, has his forehead crushed in by a stone, and a terrible battle is waged over his body. The poet in the heat of his battle thinks for a moment of the dead man. _But he in the whirling dust-storm lay, with large limbs largely fallen, forgetful of his horsemanship._ No insistence here on the ghastly wound. The reader for a breathing space is rapt from the blood and the horror into quiet spaces of oblivion. Is not this, just here, the right note to strike—and not the other? It gives the whole situation—the roaring tumult above, the unheeding body underneath—not merely one aspect. It is the more real because it is not simply painful.

Contrast, again, the Greek with the mediæval and the modern attitudes to death. See how many of the passages on death you can recall in writers not ancient are inspired by a grotesque or reflective horror, or ring with a hopeful or hopeless defiance. Think of Villon on death, and Raleigh, and Donne, and Shakespeare’s Claudio, and _Hydriotaphia_, and Browning, and Swinburne. There is nothing in the great age of Greek literature even remotely comparable to the gorgeous variety of these dreams and invocations. But if the question is of realism (as we are understanding it), if we resolve to see death as it is, neither transformed by hope nor blurred by tears, see if the ancients have not the advantage.

They will disappoint you at first. (But remember you are asking for realism.) Thus when Aristotle in his dry manner says, _Death is the most fearful thing; for it is an end, and nothing after it seems to the dead man either good or bad_, you may think it a poor attitude to strike. But Aristotle is not striking an attitude at all, he is simply facing a fact. He may be wrong, of course, but that is how death looks to Aristotle, and he is not going to gild the pill either for you or for himself. But if you miss in Aristotle the thrill of the greatest literature, you must feel it in the last words of Socrates to the judges who had condemned him. _But now is come the hour of departure, for me that have to die, for you that have still to live; but which path leads to a better lot is hidden from all but God._ And with that Socrates falls silent, leaving the reader silent too, and a little ashamed perhaps of our importunate hells and heavens.

Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles in Hades and speaks of the great honour in which the young hero is held here. _Not of death_, replies Achilles, _speak thou in words of comfort, glorious Odysseus! Rather above ground would I be the hired servant of a man without a lot, whose livelihood is but small, than reign over all the perished dead._ The truth as he sees it is what you get from the Greek every time. Odysseus hears it from Achilles, the greatest of the dead. He hears it from Elpênor, one of the least. (Elpênor got drunk in Circe’s house and, feeling hot, wandered on to the roof, where he fell asleep, and everybody forgot about him. In the morning he was aroused by the noise of people moving about and jumped up, forgetting where he was, and fell backwards from the roof and broke his neck.) _Ah, go not and leave me behind unwept and unburied, turning thy back on me, lest I become a vessel of the wrath of gods upon thee; but bury me with all mine armour, and by the margin of the whitening sea heap me a high grave of a man that had no luck, that even after ages may know. This do for me, and on my grave plant the oar with which, alive, I rowed among my comrades._ The natural pathos of this must touch everybody. But I wonder if everybody feels how much of its effect is due to an almost harsh avoidance of sentimentality, as in that hidden threat of the pleading ghost. And even that piercing last line about the oar—it may grieve certain readers to know that setting up an oar on the grave was merely part of a ritual usually observed in the burial of a dead mariner.

The _corpus_ of Greek inscriptions naturally contains a great many epitaphs. There is not one, belonging to what we think of as the great age of Greece, that has the least grain of smugness or hypocrisy or sentimentality. It must be confessed that these “pagans” could die with a good grace. Here is an inscription, _incerti loci_, “of uncertain provenience,” but in the Greek of Attica. _The tomb of Phrasikleia, “I shall be called a maid for evermore, having won from the gods this name instead of marriage.”_ I ought to add at once that the original is grave and beautiful poetry. I can only give the sense. One must read the Greek to feel entirely how good Phrasikleia is. At least she is not Little Nell. Some of the most famous epitaphs are by known authors; the most famous of all by Simonides. Over the Tegeans who fell in battle against the Barbarian he wrote: _Here lie the men whose valour was the cause that smoke went not up to heaven from broad Tegea burning; who resolved to leave their city flourishing in freedom to their children, and themselves to die among the foremost fighters_. All these little poems are beyond translation. The art of them lies in a deliberate bareness or baldness, which ought to be shockingly prosaic (and in English almost inevitably is so), but contrives to be thrilling poetry. The finest of all the epigrams is that on the Three Hundred who fell at Thermopylae. _O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we lie here, following their instructions._ Literally that is what it says. Yet I suppose that even a man who does not know Greek may feel in an instinctive way that it may be extraordinarily good in the original. It is. It is an instance of the famous Laconic brevity, whose virtue it was to cut at once to the heart of things. One other epigram I will add, partly because it also refers to the time of the Persian Wars, partly because the author was said (perhaps rightly) to be Plato. It is on the people of Eretria, a town in Euboea by the seashore, who were carried off into captivity and settled by Darius far away, hopelessly far, “at Arderikka in the Kissian land” beyond the Tigris. _We who one day left the deep-voiced swell of the Aegean lie here midmost the Plain of Ecbatana. Good-bye Eretria, our city famous once; good-bye Athens, the neighbour of Eretria; good-bye dear sea._ By the side of this mere “pathos” looks almost vulgar. If Plato wrote it, he was certainly a poet; but it is improbable that he did. I notice that Professor Burnet thinks Plato did not write any of the poems attributed to him in the manuscripts. In any case, when people say that Plato was “really a poet” they are thinking of his prose. I cannot help adding the irrelevancy that I wish they would not go on repeating this. He is an incomparably great master of imaginative prose. Is that not enough? He may have been no better at poetry than Ruskin or Carlyle. A poet is a man who writes poems.

Next to death the great test of sincerity is love. There used to be a general opinion that love, as we understand it, did not exist among the ancients at all. That point has been already discussed, but we may consider for a little the treatment of love in the Attic dramatists, who best represent the great period of Athenian development. There is plenty of love in them, only they don’t mention it. “Please do not be impatient,” as the Greek orators say, “until you hear what I mean.” Let us take Aeschylus, the earliest of the dramatists, first, and for a play let us take his _Agamemnon_. The great character is Clytaemnestra. She has allowed herself to become the paramour of a vile and cowardly relation of her husband called Aegisthus, who apparently seduced her out of mere idleness and hatred of King Agamemnon. When her husband returns she treacherously murders him.... What are you going to make of a subject like that? How are you going to make Clytaemnestra, I will not say “sympathetic,” but merely human and tolerable? It seems an insoluble problem. Yet Aeschylus solves it. For one thing, he represents Agamemnon, the nominal hero of the play, as rather wooden, weak and bombastic—not very unlike Julius Caesar, the nominal hero of Shakespeare’s play, where the dramatist had a similar but less difficult problem. The result is that the sympathies of the reader are not too deeply stirred in favour of the victim. Again, Clytaemnestra appears to be really in love with Aegisthus, while her feeling towards her husband is not merely the thirst for revenge or the hate a woman conceives of the man she has wronged; it is a physical abhorrence. She loathes him in her flesh. It is impossible to explain by what miracle of genius we are led to receive this impression, for she speaks nothing but flatteries and cajolery. Yet every speech of hers to him, as he dimly feels, shudders with a secret disgust. These long, glittering, coiling sentences are certainly not politic; they are the expression of a morbid loathing, which has ended by fascinating itself. When the blood of her lord bursts over her she _rejoices no less than the sown ground in the heaven’s bright gift of rain_. Now in the play Agamemnon is rather ineffective, but at any rate he is more a man than the immeasurably contemptible Aegisthus. Is it to be supposed that Clytaemnestra does not know that? Of course she knows, but she does not cease to love Aegisthus on that account. So the matter stands. Aeschylus does not make it any easier for you. A bad modern playwright would make Clytaemnestra a sadly misunderstood woman with a pitiful “case.” It so happens that the queen does have something of a case, really a good case, but she does not much insist on it. She knows quite well that it is not for her murdered daughter’s sake that she has killed the king. Neither is it from fear of detection; the woman does not know the meaning of fear. Aeschylus will not purchase your sympathy for her by any pretences. One of his unexpected, wonderful touches is to make her superbly intelligent. She feels herself so much superior intellectually to every one else that she hardly takes the trouble to deceive them. Nobody is asked to like Clytaemnestra, but surely she gives food for some reflection on the power and subtlety of Greek psychology, and the unswerving truthfulness of Greek realism, in a peculiarly complex affair of the heart.

There are in Sophocles at least two fine and tender studies of conjugal love of the conventional (but not silly conventional) type, namely Tekmessa in the _Ajax_ and Dêianeira in the _Trachinian Women_; and one study not conventional in the very least, the Iokasta of _Oedipus the King_. She is the woman who slew herself because she had borne children to her own son, who had murdered his father, who begot him by her. The legend has made her a thing of night and horror. Sophocles has made her grand, proud, sceptical, lonely, pitiful, ravaged by thoughts not to be breathed, horribly pathetic. But these three are wives. Of love between man and maid Sophocles has hardly a word to say. People quote Haimon and Antigone. There is no doubt of the young man’s love for Antigone; he dies for her. But is she in love with Haimon? She is betrothed to him of course, but in ancient Greece these matters were arranged. She probably liked him a good deal; everybody likes him; but we are speaking of love. Those who have little doubts on the subject quote her cry, _Dearest Haimon, how thy father slights thee!_ which she utters when Kreon has said, _I hate bad wives for my sons_. But they have no right to quote the cry as hers until they have proved she utters it; which they don’t, but merely assume the manuscripts be wrong. The manuscripts give the line to Ismênê, the sister of Antigone, and they appear to be clearly right. Any one who looks at the context will see that it is Ismênê who brings the mention of Haimon into the dispute with Kreon. Antigone stands apart in proud and indignant silence. She will die rather than let the man who has outraged her dead brother see how much her resistance is costing her. Besides, I think the manuscripts are right anyway. Imagine the case of an extremely high-minded young lady, who for the very best reasons has quarrelled with her prospective father-in-law. The young lady’s sister reminds the old man that after all Octavia is engaged to his son, which provokes the retort, “I object to bad wives for my boys.” Would Octavia then exclaim, “Dearest William, how your father insults you!”? Well, would she? But it looks delightfully like what Octavia’s sister would say. Therefore, I vote for the manuscripts and giving the line to Ismênê.

Antigone had two brothers, Eteokles and Polyneikes. After their father had been driven from Thebes the brethren disputed the succession to his throne. Polyneikes lost, and took refuge in Argos, where he gathered assistance and marched against his native city. The attempt had no success, and Polyneikes and Eteokles fell in single combat. This mutual fratricide left Kreon, their uncle, king. He, in a flame of “patriotism,” had Eteokles interred with honour and commanded that the body of Polyneikes should be left unburied. Such an order might be compared to excommunication, for the effect of it was for ever to bar the spirit of the dead from peace. Antigone sprinkled dust on the naked corpse, which satisfied the gods of the underworld and eluded the penalty of the ban. When Kreon asks her if the spirit of Eteokles will not resent the saining of his fraternal enemy—which would be the orthodox opinion—she replies, beautifully but inconsequently, _It is not my nature to join in hating, but in loving_. She also speaks of a higher, unwritten law. But Polyneikes is the favourite brother. I hardly think any one can read carefully the _Antigone_ and the _Oedipus at Colonus_ without seeing that. All through the _Antigone_ he is never out of her thoughts. “Natural enough,” you may be inclined to say. But is it? On the supposition that she is in love with Haimon? There is another play, the _Electra_, in which Sophocles portrays the love of a sister for a brother; and there are a good many points of resemblance between Electra and Antigone. Only there is in the love of Electra for Orestes (whom she brought up) a fierce, hungry, maternal quality, which would be out of place between the children of Oedipus.

When we pass to Euripides we seem by comparison to approach the modern. The impression is largely illusory, but not wholly false. It is the fact that he is troubled by many of the problems that trouble us, and it is the fact that he sometimes answers, or does not answer, them in a way we should regard as modern. This comes out in his treatment of love. It is best seen in the _Medea_ and the _Hippolytus_. Medea has a special interest for us because she is a Barbarian (princess of Colchis in the eastern corner of the Black Sea). But her case is quite simple. She is a woman in love with a man who is tired of her. Necessarily he cuts a poor figure in the story. She had saved his life. On the other hand, she had thrown herself at his head, she had done her best to ruin his chances in life, and all she had now to offer him was a perfect readiness to murder anybody who stood in his way. She is one of those women who are never satisfied unless the man is making love to them all the time, so that one may have a sneaking sympathy for that embarrassed, if rather contemptible, Jason. Indeed, Euripides’ opinion of this kind of “Romantic” love is probably no higher than Mr. Shaw’s. It is the passion of the Barbarian woman. That does not prevent Euripides from sympathizing profoundly with Medea, the passionate, wronged, foreign woman. Why, indeed, should it? The case of Medea, as Euripides with the pregnant brevity of Greek art presents it, has seemed to many as true as death. It is an excellent example of realism.

More definitely than the _Medea_, the _Hippolytus_ is a tragedy of love. Yet in the eloquence of the Romantic lover the one is as deficient as the other. Phaedra was dying for love of Hippolytus. Her secret is discovered and she dies of shame. What an opportunity for the sentimentalist! However, adds the relentless poet, that is not all the story. Before killing herself she forged a message to her husband making the charge of Potiphar’s wife against Hippolytus. She could not die without the pleasure of hurting him. Yet Euripides does not represent her as an odious woman; quite the contrary. The question for us is, does she, when we read the play, strike us as real or not? The poet has set himself a difficult task—to convince us that a soul overthrown by desire, cruel, lying, unjust was yet essentially modest, gentle and honourable. If she is almost too convincing, so that a sentimental part of you bleeds inside, you will perceive that realism was not invented in Norway. And there is this about the Greek sort: it never exaggerates.

It is hardly to be believed how startling an effect of truth this moderation of the Greek writers can produce. Sappho, in the most famous of her odes, says that love makes her “sweat” with agony and look “greener than grass.” Perhaps she did not turn quite so green as that, although (commentators nobly observe) she would be of an olive complexion and had never seen British grass. But, even if it contain a trace of artistic exaggeration, the ode as a whole is perhaps the most convincing love-poem ever written. It breathes veracity. It has an intoxicating beauty of sound and suggestion, and it is as exact as a physiological treatise. The Greeks can do that kind of thing. Somehow we either overdo the “beauty” or we overdo the physiology. The weakness of the Barbarian, said they, is that he never hits the mean. But the Greek poet seems to do it every time. We may beat them at other things, but not at that. And they do it with so little effort; sometimes, it might appear, with none at all. Thus Aeschylus represents Prometheus as the proudest of living beings. The _Prometheus Bound_ opens with a scene in which Hephaistos, urged on by two devils called Strength and Force, nails Prometheus to a frozen, desert rock. While the hero of the play endures this horrible torture, he has to listen to the clumsy sympathy of Hephaistos, who does not like his job, and the savage taunts of the two demons. To all this he replies—nothing at all. No eloquence could express the pride of that tremendous silence. Of course there is, or there used to be, a certain kind of commentator who hastens to point out that a convention of the early Attic stage forbade more than two persons of a tragedy to speak together at any time, so that in any event it was not permissible for Prometheus to speak. All you can do with a critic like that is (mentally, I fear) to hang a millstone round his neck and cast him into the deepest part of the sea.

Not but what the point about convention, if rightly taken, is extremely notable. It is an undying wonder how the kind of realism we have been discussing could be combined with, could even, as in that instance from the _Prometheus Bound_, make use of, the limitations imposed on the ancient poet. To a reader who has not looked into the case it is hard to give even an idea of it. If a man were to tell you that he had written a novel in which the hero was Sir Anthony Dearborn and the heroine Sophia Wilde, while other characters were Squire Crabtree, Parson Quackenboss, Lieutenant Dashwood and the old Duchess of Grimthorpe, you would think to yourself you knew exactly what to expect. Yet you must admit there is nothing to prevent the man leaving out (if he can) Gretna Green, and the duel, and the eighteenth-century oaths. But if a Greek tragic dramatist put on the stage a play dealing, say, with the House of Atreus, he positively could not leave out any part of the family history. It was not done. So the audience knew your story already, and knew, roughly, your characters. Nor, as historians say, was that all. There had to be a Chorus, which had to sing lyrical odes of a mythological sort at regular intervals between the episodes of your drama; while the episodes themselves had to be composed in the iambic metre and in a certain “tragic diction” about as remote from ordinary speech as _Paradise Lost_. How Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides contrive under such conditions to give a powerful impression of novelty and naturalness it is easier to feel than explain. About the feeling at least there is no doubt. Let us look again for a moment at that singular convention, the tragic Chorus. Very often it consists of old men who ... sing and dance. Consider the incredible difficulty of keeping a number of singing and dancing old men solemn and beautiful and even holy. Yet the great tragic poets have overcome that difficulty so completely that I suppose not one reader in a hundred notices that there is a difficulty at all. The famous Chorus of old men in the _Agamemnon_, whose debility is made a point in the play, never for a moment remind one of Grandfer Cantle. Rather they remind us of that “old man covered with a mantle,” whom Saul beheld rising from the grave to pronounce his doom. It is, in their own words, as if God inspired their limbs to the dance and filled their mouths with prophecy.

There is only one way of redeeming the conventional, and that is by sincerity. I am very far from maintaining that the moral virtue of sincerity was eminently characteristic of the ancient Greek; but intellectual sincerity was. None has ever looked upon gods and men with such clear, unswerving eyes; none has understood so well to communicate that vision. To see that essential beauty is truth and truth is beauty—that is the secret of Greek art, as it is the maxim of true realism. To keep measure in all things, that no drop of life may spill over—that is the secret of Greek happiness. To be a Greek and not a Barbarian.

NOTES

THE AWAKENING

The beginnings of Ionia, the earlier homes and the racial affinities of the Ionians, are still obscure, although the point is cardinal for Greek history. There is perhaps a growing tendency to find “Mediterranean” elements in the Ionian stock, and this would explain much, if the Ionians of history did not seem so very “Aryan” in speech and habits of thought. On the other hand the “Aryan” himself is daily coming to look more cloudy and ambiguous, and so is his exact contribution to western culture.

The chief ancient sources of our information concerning the Ionians are Herodotus, Pausanias and Strabo.

P. 14. Thuc. I. 2. Thuc. I. 6. Herod. I. 57.

P. 15. See especially D. G. Hogarth, _Ionia and the East_
(1909).

J. Burnet, _Who was Javan?_ in Proceedings of the Class.
Assoc. of Scot. 1911-12. Herod. I. 142.

P. 16. Herod. I. 171 f.

P. 17. An authoritative little book dealing with (among
other peoples) the Anatolian races is D. G. Hogarth’s
_The Ancient East_ (Home Univ. Ser.), 1914. Also H. R.
Hall, _The Ancient History of the Near East_ (1913).

P. 18. V. Bérard, _Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée_ is full
of instruction on the ways of the ancient mariner.

For the Colchians, see Hippocrates _de aer. aq. loc._ 15.
_Cf._ Herod. II. 104 f.

P. 19. Chalybes. _Il._ II. 857. Herod. I. 203.

P. 20. Herod. IV. 93 f. Olbia. Herod. IV. 18. Scythian
bow. Plato, _Laws_, 795-.

P. 21. Herod. IV. 18 f.

P. 22. Herod. IV. 172 f.

P. 25. Herod. II. 152. Abusimbel inscr. in Hicks and
Hill’s _Manual_.

P. 26 f. Fragments of Archilochus in Bergk’s _Poet. Lyr.
Gr._

KEEPING THE PASS

The Battle of Thermopylae as related by Herodotus (practically our sole authority) is an epic. Therefore in telling it again I have frankly attempted an epical manner as being really less misleading than any application of the historical method. This is not to say that the narrative of Herodotus has not been greatly elucidated by the research of modern historians, especially by the exciting discovery of the path Anopaia by Mr. G. B. Grundy. I have followed his reconstruction of the battle (which may not be very far from the truth) in his book, _The Great Persian War_ (1901). See also Mr. Macan’s commentary in his great edition of Herodotus.

P. 34. See Frazer’s note on Thermopylae in his edition of
Pausanias.

P. 36. _Cf._ Xen. _Anab._ VII. 4, 4 (Thracians of Europe).

P. 39. Tiara. _schol._ Ar. _Birds_ 487. The King’s tiara
was also called _kitaris_.

P. 39. For Persian dress _cf._ with Herod. Strabo 734.
Xen. _Cyrop._ VII. 1, 2. There are also representations
in ancient art, e.g. a frieze at Susa.

THE ADVENTURERS

P. 45. Strabo IV.

P. 46. Herod. IV. 44.

P. 47. _The Greek Tradition_ (1915), Allen and Unwin, p.
6f.

P. 48. Herod. IV. 151-153.

P. 50. For an account of the Oasis at Siwah, see A. B.
Cook, _Zeus_, vol. I.

P. 51. Hymn _ad Apoll._ 391 f.

P. 52. Pind. _Ol._ 3 _ad fin._

P. 53. Herod. VI. 11, 12, 17. _Cf._ Strabo on foundation
of Marseille, IV (from Aristotle).

P. 54. Herod. III. 125, 129-137 (Demokêdês).

P. 55. Polycrates. Herod. II. 182 and III _passim_.

P. 61 f. Xen. _Anab._ I-IV.

P. 63. Pisidians. _Cf._ Xen. _Memor._ V. 2, 6.

P. 67. _L’Anabase de Xenophon avec un commentaire
historique et militaire_, by Col. (General) Arthur
Boucher, Paris, 1913.

P. 69. There is a fine imaginative picture of Nineveh in
the Book of Jonah.

P. 71. The famous Moltke was nearly drowned from a
“tellek.”

P. 77. The hot spring may be the sulphurous waters of
Murad, which have wonderful iridescences.

The Armenian underground houses are still to be seen.
These earth-houses are found elsewhere—in Scotland, for
instance. See J. E. Harrison, in _Essays and Studies
presented to W. Ridgeway_, p. 136 f.

ELEUTHERIA

P. 82. Aesch. _Pers._ 241 f. Herod. VII. 104.

P. 83. _Pers._ 402 f. Eur. _Helen_ 276.

P. 84. Thuc. I. 3, 3 (“Hellenes” and “Barbarians”
correlative terms).

Herod. I. 136.

P. 85. Aeschines 3, 132. Letter to Gadatas, Dittenb.
_Syllog._^2 2.

Herod. III. 31. _Cf._ Daniel VI. 37, 38. Ezekiel xxvi. 7.

P. 86. Herod. IX. 108-113.

P. 88. _Cf._ vengeance of Persians on Ionians, Herod. VI.
32.

Herod. VII. 135.

P. 89. Herod. VIII. 140 f.

P. 90 f. “The ancients were attached to their country
by three things—their temples, their tombs, and their
forefathers. The two great bonds which united them to
their government were the bonds of habit and antiquity.
With the moderns, hope and the love of novelty have
produced a total change. The ancients said _our
forefathers_, we say posterity; we do not, like them,
love our _patria_, that is to say, the country and the
laws of our fathers, rather we love the laws and the
country of our children; the charm we are most sensible
to is the charm of the future, and not the charm of the
past.” Joubert, transl. by M. Arnold.

P. 92. See J. E. Harrison on Anodos Vases in her
_Prolegomena_, p. 276 f.

Herod. VIII. 109. Herod. VIII. 65.

P. 96. Herod. IX. 27. _Supplices_ 314 f. But see the
whole speech of Aithra, and indeed the whole play, which
is full of the mission of Athens as

the champion of Hellenism. _Cf._ also Eur. _Heraclid_. G.
Murray, Introduction to trans. of Eur. _Hippol._ etc., on
“Significance of _Bacchae_” (1902).

P. 97. Thuc. I. 70, 9. Herod. VII. 139. Dem. _de Cor._
199 f.

P. 98. Arist. _Pol._ 1317^2 40, agreeing with Plato
_Resp._ 562B.

P. 99. Plato _Resp._ 563c. Herod. III. 80.

Herod. V. 78. _Cf._ Hippocr. _de aer. aq. loc._ 23, 24.
Both agree that a high spirit may be produced by suitable
_nomoi_ and that man’s spirits are “enslaved” under
autocracy. This is a more liberal doctrine than that
discussed in Aristotle, that Barbarians are slaves “by
nature.”

P. 100. _Supplices_ 403 f. _Medea_ 536 f.

The association of Liberty and Law is exhibited both
positively and negatively (as in the breach of both
by the tyrant) in the tragic poets, etc. Thus the
_Suppliants_ of Aeschylus is concerned with a point of
marriage-law, the _Antigone_ of Sophocles with a point of
burial-law, and so on.

Another “romantic” hero is Cadmus.

P. 104. Hom. _Il._ VI. 447 f.

SOPHROSYNE

P. 110. Plato _Resp._ 329B. _ib._ 439E.

P. 111. Plato _Resp._ 615c. Xen. _Hellen._ VI. 4, 37.

P. 112. Plut. _Pelop._ 29. Herod. III. 50; V. 92.

P. 120. Herod. VIII. 26.

P. 121. _Purg._ XXIV. 137-8.

GODS AND TITANS

P. 122. _Od._ III. 48.

P. 123 f. I may allow myself to refer, for more detailed
evidence, to my article _The Religious Background of
the “Prometheus Vinctus”_ in Harvard Studies in Class.
Philol. vol. XXXI, 1920. _Cf._ Prof. G. Murray in
_Anthropology and the Classics_, ed. R. R. Marett.

P. 124. _Theog._ 126 f. _Theog._ 147 f. “ill to name,”
οὐκ ὀνομαστοί. I think the meaning may be that to mention
their names was dangerous—especially if you got them
wrong. _Cf._ Aesch. Ag. 170. The Romans provided against
this danger by the _indigitamenta_.

P. 126. _Theog._ 453 f.

P. 128. _Theog._ 617 f. _Theog._ 503 f.

P. 129. Solmsen, _Indog. Forsch._ 1912, XXX, 35 n. 1.
_Theog._ 886 f. _Theog._ 929^h f.

P. 130. Heracl. _fr._ 42 (Diels). Xenophan. _fr._ 11.

Pind. _Ol._ I. 53 f.

P. 136. On the “anarchic life,” see Plato _Laws_ 693-699.
Democritus (139) says, “Law aims at the amelioration
of human life and is capable of this, when men are
themselves disposed to accept it; for law reveals
to every man who obeys it his special capacity for
excellence.”

Zeus, acc. to Plato _Crit. sub fin._ is a
_constitutional_ ruler.

P. 137. Herod. I. 34 f.

CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC