Chapter XI: Introduction (9)

Coins of Cnidos indicate the pose of the statue with sufficient clearness for us to identify a Venus in the Vatican as a copy of the Cnidian Aphrodite.[79] Papal decency has seen fit to encase her legs, beginning just below the hips, with drapery constructed of tin. This would, if anything could, impair the aspect of perfect modesty which shows in every line of her pose and expression. She is not aware of human spectators; there is no self-conscious prudery, as in the abominable Medici Venus, which was an attempt by a later and baser generation to imitate the same type. She has left her robe to hang over the tall water-jar, and is stepping from or towards the bath, not without shrinking, and not in ignorance of her beauty. Even in this imperfect copy we recognise the qualities which made Lucian admire the statue--“the design of the scalp and forehead, the finely pencilled eyebrows, and the look of the eyes, so tender, yet so bright and joyful.” He adds elsewhere that “a proud smile plays over her lips.” A lovely girl’s head in Parian marble, now in the Glyptothek at Munich, appears to me so clearly to resemble a younger sister of the same goddess that it must bear some relation to an original by Praxiteles.[80]

The Capitoline Gallery also possesses a copy of the “Young Satyr” of Praxiteles, “called by the Greeks περιβοητός”--that is, world-famed.[81] Readers of Hawthorne will remember his eloquent description of the “Marble Faun,” and though we, better supplied with ancient originals, can recognise that this is only _after_ (and not very near) Praxiteles, yet even as it stands the statue has a peculiar charm and fascination. The sculptor has conveyed the impression of a young creature of the woods, only half human, shy and wild as an animal, and as

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careless and happy. His smile is as lazy as his attitude. Yet we notice the reserve with which his animal characteristics are indicated merely in the shape of his pointed ear and the “unclassical” profile of his face. Not only is his weight thrown upon one leg, as in all the statues by Praxiteles, but the other foot is gracefully curled round it. This is the only complete ancient copy of the Satyr, but there is a mutilated torso in the Louvre, so fine in its finish and texture that some critics suppose it to be original.

Of the Eros which Phryne dedicated at Thespiæ we have no certain copies. But it is evident that many of the Erotes in our galleries were inspired by that masterpiece, and the prettiest is the Eros of Centocelle, a three-quarters figure of admirable design, though of rather slack execution.[82] I believe also that the bronze head of a youth at Naples might well trace its parentage to an Eros by Praxiteles, though the languishing craft of the eyes and the sensuous fullness of the lips are certainly exaggerated.[83]

But of course if we want to know the real Praxiteles we have only to take our ticket to Olympia and worship there at the shrine of Hermes. Here for the first time we have an unquestionable original work by the hand of a great master. This Hermes was found more than thirty years ago by the German excavators in the very temple of Hera where Pausanias had seen him. No copy or cast or photograph can do more than faintly shadow the incomparable beauty of the marble. From the photograph we may appreciate the delicacy of the whole design, in which dignity so marvellously blends with grace and strength with charm.[84] It is Hermes the young Arcadian shepherd’s patron deity, Hermes the musician of the tortoise-lyre, the weaver of guile, the bringer of luck, and the kindly escort of souls on their last ferrying. He is playing in careless indulgence with a baby boy, the infant god of wine, but his eyes and his gentle smile are for some one farther off--not the human spectator. It may be noted, as proving that the technical triumphs of Greek art were gained, not by inspiration, but by hard work at established types, that the child is not very successfully rendered. Greek sculptors could not even yet sufficiently detach themselves from convention to copy the round contours of a baby’s face. Critics are divided in their attempts to reconstruct the motive of the raised right shoulder. Evidently the right hand held some object charming to the infant Dionysus, a bunch of grapes, perhaps, or the serpent-wreathed wand proper to Hermes. As it stands in the photograph we can recognise the loveliest statue in existence, but we cannot see the craft with which the surfaces and textures are rendered. We do not know for certain whether Greek sculptors of the fourth century habitually worked their own statues from start to finish with their own hands. We do know that the surface-finish was regarded as a very important part of the work, and that there were various devices, such as wax-polishing, employed to get the fullest value out of the grain of the marble for flesh parts. Praxiteles is especially named as employing a colourist to tint his marble.

In addition to the Hermes, we have direct literary evidence as to a great group of Artemis and Apollo, the work of Praxiteles, at Mantinea. We are told also the subject of certain reliefs on the architectural base of it, and reliefs of very fine workmanship corresponding in subject have been excavated at Mantinea. There is thus a very fair presumption that these panels were designed, if not executed, by the master who made the group. One slab, here illustrated,[85] shows the contest between Apollo the harper and Marsyas the semi-bestial player of that barbarous instrument the flute. Marsyas had challenged Apollo to a contest, and being quite inevitably defeated was flayed alive as a punishment for his presumption. The penalty is delicately indicated by the Phrygian slave who holds the knife in the centre. The fourth-century artists seldom missed a psychological point, and Praxiteles has emphasised the contrast between the dignified god in his majestic harper’s robes

_English Photo Co., Athens_]

and the naked, violent Satyr distending his cheeks as flute-playing barbarians were not ashamed to do. It is evident that the Marsyas is a quotation by Praxiteles of the celebrated figure by Myron. We note, as a technical point in the history of relief sculpture, the effect produced by the wide spacing of the figures. On the other slabs are beautiful though mutilated figures of the Muses, who acted as umpires in the contest.

We have copies also of another Praxitelean original, Apollo Sauroctonos (the Lizard-slayer),[86] but the copyist has evidently exaggerated almost to caricature the elegant slimness of the young god. But on the basis of our knowledge of the Hermes I think we can reconstruct in imagination an exquisite statue even out of the effeminate Vatican copy. The true Apollo would not lean all his weight upon the tree; consequently the tilt of his hips would be less violent. His face would be much more carefully modelled, with less of that womanish smoothness of contour. But the copyist has noted and tried to express the lovely brow which Praxiteles gave to all his heads. The careless grace, the impression of youth and playful strength belong to the original, and are highly characteristic of the artist. The motive of the statue seems to have been a new and rather bold invention; we know of no cult of a lizard-slaying Apollo. It is true that Apollo was the deity commonly invoked in cases of natural plagues, such as invasions of field-mice or locusts, but it seems more probable that Praxiteles, desiring to represent Apollo in a new guise, deliberately chose to portray him as a boy at play. It is clear that Praxiteles was a strongly original and inventive genius, who was not afraid to give his own impression of established types. He was the first who dared to portray Aphrodite naked; out of the gross and bestial Satyr he made a delightful elf of the woods, and he turned the vigorous athlete Apollo into a slender stripling.

Of Scopas the Parian, the second great sculptor of the fourth century, we have no important remains. Two mutilated heads found on the site of the temple at Tegea, where he made his great pedimental scene of the Calydonian boar-hunt, indicate the new note of pathos and emotion which he introduced into the carving of the human head. We know that Scopas was engaged on the Mausoleum and on one of the thirty-six sculptured columns of the great temple at Ephesus, but nothing that remains from either of those buildings can be ascribed to him with certainty. Perhaps his most famous work was the Palatine Apollo at Rome. We may get the best notion of his style by studying the head, not the body, of a beautiful statue of Meleager[87] at Rome, which is considered by the most competent archæologists to be a copy of the work of Scopas.

The third is Lysippus of Sicyon, an extraordinarily prolific artist, of whose style we may form a very clear conception, although we have no originals. Athletic types were his favourite work, and his favourite technique was bronze-casting. His discovery was the added grace and beauty which could result from decreasing the proportion of the head to the body. Wherever we find small curly heads very lightly poised upon a strong, vigorous body we may trace the influence of Lysippus. His most famous statue was the young athlete scraping off the oil from his arm with the strigil. The emperor Tiberius fell in love with this “Apoxyomenus,” as it is called, and removed it from the front of the baths of Agrippa to his own bed-chamber, but the people of Rome raised such an outcry that he had to restore it. Modern critics have shown that our “Apoxyomenus”[88] is not a faithful copy of this statue. On the other hand, the “Agias” recently discovered at Delphi[89] is a contemporary marble copy of a bronze by Lysippus, and gives us a very fine example of his style. Lysippus was also the sculptor-in-ordinary to Alexander the Great, and we may trace to Lysippean originals all the numerous portraits of the Macedonian conqueror. Lysippus was a theorist as well as a practical sculptor, and, like Polycleitus, produced his own theoretical “Canon” of sculptural proportions. He was (with

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the possible exception of the Devil) the first professed impressionist, for Pliny records a saying of his: “Other sculptors had represented men as they were, while he portrayed them as they appeared to be.”

We have many fine works of the fourth century of unknown authorship. Foremost of all--surely one of the six greatest statues in the world[90]--is the Demeter of Cnidos, in the British Museum, a statue so instinct with the spirit of Greek tragedy that but for certain technical points it ought to belong to the fifth century.[91] This is Mother Earth, Our Lady of Sorrows, mourning with sad eyes, but not in despair, for her daughter Persephone. The influence of Praxiteles may be traced in her brow and lips. The workmanship of this statue, as being, with the exception of temple reliefs, the finest Greek original in our Museum, deserves careful study. Very beautiful also is that sculptured drum from one of the thirty-six columns of the great temple of “Diana of the Ephesians,” another of the treasures of our Museum.[92] It is scarcely probable that time should have spared the one column which Scopas himself designed, but we may trace some of his influence in the emotional character of the faces, and much of Praxiteles in the grace of the attitudes and the poetry of the concept. The application of relief to a rounded surface is in itself a work of great difficulty, and we have seen how boldly it had been attempted in the same temple by artists of a much earlier day. This is a funeral scene such as might be represented on an Attic tombstone. In the centre is a matronly figure, headless, alas! fastening her mantle on her shoulder preparatory to the journey; on her left is Hermes, very young and boyish, extending his caduceus as if pointing downwards, but looking upwards to a point above the woman’s head. On her right is another figure, whom from his long wings and boyish form we should take, perhaps, for Love, were it not that his sad eyes and heavy sword mark him out as Death--a beautiful conception found also on the new Ludovisi relief and on some of the Athenian lecythi. Some think that the woman is Alcestis, and it is scarcely likely that any but a heroine, at the least, would occupy such a place in such a building. To make both these emissaries of death so young and charming is an idea typical of the fourth century, and especially of Praxiteles.

In many of the bronzes of our museums we can trace very clearly the new influence of Lysippus. A fine example is provided by the figure of a youth[93] recently dredged up under romantic circumstances off the island of Cythera (Cerigo), which lies at the extreme southerly point of Laconia, This was part of a cargo of spoils from Greece looted by the Roman general Sulla and shipwrecked off Cape Matapan. No satisfactory guess has yet been made as to the name of the statue or the motive of its attitude. In my opinion the upstretched arm in readiness to grasp seems to indicate an athlete playing a game of “catch.” “The Praying Boy,” one of the treasures of Berlin, is a singularly perfect bronze, full of grace, probably the work of Boethos, a famous sculptor of the early part of the third century.[94] The Ludovisi Ares[95] is a marble copy of an original which shows unmistakable influence of Lysippus, and the restful attitude of the handsome war-god, so free from any trace of ferocity, is characteristic of the manner in which the fourth century civilised and humanised all its topics. So is the Rondanini Medusa,[96] a Gorgon’s head translated into terms of decorative beauty--it might be a design for a door-knocker. The snakes are there, and the chilly glance, but there is nothing terrible in the face. The lovely winged head, which originally belonged to a full-length statue of Hypnos (Sleep), is one of the most striking bronzes in the British Museum.[97] It is clearly related to the period which produced that figure of Death, “the brother of Sleep,” on the Ephesian column. This example has been covered by exposure to the air with a beautiful green patina,

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FIG. 1. THE “RONDANINI” MEDUSA

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FIG. 2. RELIEF FROM THE MAUSOLEUM

PLATE LXXIII]

often imitated with the application of acids by modern bronze-workers. But the Herculaneum bronzes, which had been preserved for eighteen centuries in an airproof casing of lava, are to-day in much the same condition as when they left the studio. Though they were made, no doubt, in Roman times, Lysippus is again the artist whose influence is most clearly visible, as, for example, in the vivid Pair of Wrestlers, or the Seated Hermes.

I have already said that the old cities of Greece were mostly too impoverished to undertake great architectural works in this period. Ephesus, however, had her great temple of Artemis burned down by an enterprising individual with the very modern ambition of getting his name before the public. For fear of increasing his success I will not repeat it here, but when Alexander the Great offered to rebuild the temple out of his own pocket the Ephesians declined, possibly on the ground that their temple had already advertised a malefactor and they did not desire it to be a further advertisement for a benefactor. So they rebuilt it themselves with such splendour that it became one of the Seven Wonders of the world.

Advertisement, you see, was in the air. The almost extreme self-repression of the individual was passing, and in the same spirit a wealthy ruler of Caria who in Greek eyes was a tyrant and in Persian eyes a satrap determined to raise a tomb for himself and his wife which should also be a wonder of the world. His name was Mausolus, and the Mausoleum he built consisted of a columned shrine raised upon a lofty pedestal and surmounted with a pyramidal structure of ever-narrowing square courses of masonry, the whole crowned by a colossal portrait statue of Mausolus and his wife Artemisia in a chariot. Considerable remains were found by Sir Charles Newton at Halicarnassus, and are now in the British Museum. We know that Scopas and other famous artists were employed upon the work. The most important relic is the colossal statue of Mausolus, which, considering its situation, is in remarkably fine preservation.[98] Here we have perhaps for the first time in all the history of art a realistic portrait. The face of the prince is not in the least conventional, has, in fact, a distinctly barbarian profile, yet preserves a dignity and worth of its own, and visibly suggests a foreign plutocrat. The reliefs[99] which adorned the pedestal are also distinctive and interesting. We observe, as on the Mantinean basis, that the figures are widely spaced. Their poses are visibly contrived for decorative effect on a system of correspondences much less subtle, and therefore much less effective, than on the Parthenon frieze. The designer, who may have been Scopas himself, has not shrunk from portraying violent action in the battle of Amazons, which is his subject. Yet there is beauty in every figure, and remarkable technical skill.

Another famous work of decorative sculpture belonging to this period is the colossal group of the Niobids. It was brought to Rome from somewhere in Asia Minor, probably Cilicia, and apparently copied by several Græco-Roman artists of very various powers. The original dates, no doubt, from the fourth century. It seems to have formed a group of detached statues set up on a pedestal either in the open air or in a colonnade. The general arrangement of the figures resembles that of a pedimental composition, for the whole group would be pyramidal, with Niobe herself as the apex figure. Niobe’s tragedy is an example of divine jealousy aroused by excessive human felicity and pride, for Niobe was so proud of the beauty of her large family that she exulted over Leto, who had but two children, Apollo and Artemis. Accordingly she and all her brood were shot down by the painless arrows of the two gods. The “plot” of the group is a study in psychology, typical of the fourth century, showing how the various members of the doomed family met their deaths. Here again the technique is wonderful; every figure is designed in a broad architectural spirit. The actual figures, as we have them, mostly at Florence, are of varying merit. Probably the best is the most recently discovered, which is here illustrated.[100] But all are of rather frigid perfection in workmanship.

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THE OTHER ARTS

Nothing has been said here about painting, because Greek painting is essentially a matter for the professional archæologist who can study what Pliny and others said about it and try to find some intelligent meaning in it by reference to pottery and sculpture. Of course the influence of Polygnotus, Parrhasios, Zeuxis, and Apelles should be traceable even in the humble decorators of pitcher, pot, and pipkin. But we have no relics of the original work of any of those artists, and the ancient art critic is an obscure and uncertain guide. He seems to have had the most ridiculous canons of art, and to have considered it the greatest triumph of painting when birds came to peck at the grapes in a picture. The only Greek pictures that we have are the mural frescoes and mosaics of Pompeii, which belong properly to the Roman department, and a few Egyptian mummy-cases painted by Greek artists. Therefore, if you please, we will leave Greek painting to the connoisseurs, with the remark that Apelles of the fourth century was considered the greatest of all Greek masters.

Nor can the ordinary student of culture get much satisfaction out of Greek music. It is rather cheering to reflect that after all they did not know everything down in Athens, but left one or two things for us to discover. One of them was harmony. We have heard accomplished savants give curious and not wholly unpleasant renderings of Greek music, and distinguished composers like Sir Hubert Parry have written very beautiful airs which are said to be Greek. Broadly speaking, we may divide modern reproductions of Greek music into two classes: those that are Greek, and those that are music. It is certain that the Greeks attached very great importance to music, far more, in fact, than we do. It was the foremost instrument of ancient education, and philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato insisted very seriously upon its moral and spiritual efficacy. The Greeks divided music into three principal modes, according to the key employed. The Dorian

Mode was the lowest in pitch. It was the music of the seven- or eight-stringed cithara used in martial songs and dances. The Spartans were so conservative in matters of music, as in all else, that when the famous Timotheus of Miletus appeared in their city with his new twelve-stringed harp the Ephors ordered the strings to be broken. The Phrygian Mode was based on the major scale with a flat seventh (G to G), and the Lydian on the major with a sharp fourth (F to F). The Lydian was the music of the “soft, complaining flute,” and its high-pitched sounds were condemned by the austere critics of the mainland as too sensuous and emotional. Wind music was, as we have seen on the monuments, originally regarded as a barbarian monstrosity, but a fourth-century dinner-party would scarcely have been complete without at least one turn on the double pipe by a pretty _aulētris_. A sort of double pipe is still used by Greek shepherd-boys, and in the modern example which I have seen one pipe was used as a “drone,” as in the bagpipes. This instrument is probably a humble survivor of the “syrinx” played by Arcadian shepherds in antiquity and by the modern impresario of Punch and Judy shows--in fact, the Pan-pipes. The superior instrument played by the _aulētris_ would be really a double clarinet. The flute, as we have it, was not known in antiquity.

The Greek potter never made any legitimate advance beyond the Red-figured Style of the fifth century. In the early part of the fourth century there is no appreciable change of style; the technique is a little more perfect, the aim is a little less vigorous. The series of Panathenaic amphoræ[101] (those large jars painted with figures of Athena and athletic subjects intended for prizes at the Panathenaic games) continues unbroken, and their design changes little because they have to correspond with a conventional type. The custom was that they should have their figures in black, and accordingly the painter obeyed the custom by leaving parts of his vase in the natural red of the burnt clay, and treating those parts as

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panels on which he painted his figures in black.[102] One change we notice: vases are no longer signed by the artist. We conclude from this that pottery is no longer assigned to known masters like Hieron and Douris for decoration, but more mechanically produced in large numbers by humble craftsmen in factories. This would correspond with the increased professionalism which characterises this period in all departments of life. Towards the end of the century--that is, in the days of Alexander--it appears that vases were more frequently made in metal; not that we have any metal vases surviving, but the earthenware takes forms which can only be explained as imitation of metal. Thus the surface is often raised in relief, and vases are apparently cast in moulds.

Coins and gems[103] exhibit increased technical mastery. It must not be forgotten that coin types, being generally of religious significance, are apt to be very slow in responding to the artistic fashions of the day. This is especially the case with Athenian coinage. The Athena type with owl and olive-branch on the reverse is always of a conventional and somewhat archaic character. Elsewhere the coins and gems of the fourth century reach their highest point of perfection, and that is a point which has never been surpassed. As usual, Syracuse is in the forefront for beauty of design, and her new series of tyrants, Dionysius I. and II., revive the glorious types of Gelo and Hiero and improve them. The decadrachms of this period representing the head of the nymph Arethusa surrounded with dolphins and bearing on the reverse a four-horse chariot at full gallop are regarded by numismatists as the most beautiful coins in existence. The best of these bear the signature of their engraver, Euænetus. A gold coinage began here about the time of the repulse of the Athenian Armada. Corinthian coins with the flying Pegasus on the obverse and a head of Athena in a Corinthian helmet on the reverse also attain the summit of their beauty in this century. But even out-of-the-way places like Panticapæum, the corn depot of Southern Russia, and the little island of Tenedos, which to the historian _est in conspectu_ and little more, employed engravers of consummate art. Just before the beginning of the century three cities of the island of Rhodes united to form one republic, which rapidly rose to wealth by way of commerce and good government. It produced a gold coinage of great excellence, the figure of the sun-god Helios on the obverse and a rose (Rhodes) as a punning emblem on the reverse. It is only with Alexander the Great and his successors that the portraiture of mortal rulers begins to appear on Greek coinage. It is then rapidly developed, and some of the barbarian monarchs of the East are portrayed by Greek artists with great vigour and realism.

Lastly, architecture exhibits similar tendencies towards technical facility and a less austere spirit in the use of ornament. To this period belong the new temple at Ephesus and the Mausoleum already mentioned, and the kindred sepulchral monument from Lycia known as the Nereid Monument, from the graceful figures of sea-nymphs set between the columns on the tall basis of the shrine. In Athens we have the new stone theatre of Dionysus, the new stadium for athletic contests, the little choragic monument of Lysicrates, and the new walls to the Peiræus constructed by Conon with Persian help. The luxurious Corinthian order is now more popular than the staid Doric. The invention of this beautiful type, with its curling acanthus leaves embowering the original volutes of the Ionic capital, is attributed to the Athenian sculptor Callimachus, a versatile artist of Periclean days.[104] It was the discovery of a new drill for stone-cutting which made it possible. A legendary explanation of its origin was naturally provided. Callimachus had been struck with the beauty of a column on which a woman had placed a basket of flowers in memory of the maiden whose tomb it marked, and a live acanthus had sprung from the cracked stone below the basket. The earliest appearance of the Corinthian capital is, so far as we know, to be found in the

temple at Bassæ. It became increasingly popular, especially in Roman times. Owing to its slenderer shaft, Vitruvius compares the Corinthian order to a young girl, while he likens the Ionic to a matron and the Doric to a man.

In the terra-cotta statuettes which have been found in such large numbers at Tanagra and elsewhere we have some of the most delightful as well as the most characteristic examples of fourth-century art.[105] They are generally found in tombs, and seem to have been made for the purpose. They seldom represent deities, though we have several examples of Eros, and perhaps Aphrodite. Far the commonest subject is a young girl draped in a mantle. Indeed, the maker of such ware is called in Greek Koroplastes--“Girl-modeller.” Domestic scenes are common, girls talking, dancers, animals, and so forth. Some are jointed, and many of them were obviously designed as toys. Sometimes they were glazed, but far more often the colours were applied directly to the clay after it came from the mould. The colours have therefore in many cases entirely disappeared. Apart from their singular grace and charm, they give us extremely interesting examples of Greek costume. The British Museum has a very fine collection, which well deserves study. A few of them appear to be modelled from famous statues of the period.

LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY

This is, as we have noticed, an age of Prose. Poetry is for the time being almost extinct, partly, perhaps, because the Athenian theatre was already so well supplied with material by the great masters of the previous generation, and partly because public recitation was no longer the sole means of publication for literature. It is true that Agathon, a member of the literary circle which included Socrates and Plato, was esteemed almost on a level with the three great tragedians, but all his work has been allowed to perish. The fourth century is the era of the “Middle Comedy,” a stage of transition in which political references were being abandoned and the delineation of manners and social life was taking its place. But no great names attach to this stage, and no relics survive. The New Comedy of manners, in which the great master was Menander, begins towards the end of the fourth century and fills the first half of the third.

Prose would naturally fall into three categories--History, including political and economic writings, Oratory, and Philosophy.

The fifth century had produced the two great historians Herodotus and Thucydides, both of whom treated their subject from a lofty standpoint with a distinctly ethical purpose. The typical historian of the fourth century has a much more restricted outlook. Instead of seeking to point a moral or to illustrate the larger aspects of life, he is contented with investigating and narrating the facts of the past for their own sake or for any purpose to which the reader may care to put them. Such were Ephorus and Theopompus, whose work, though lost to us, formed the base upon which such writers as Plutarch built their narratives. Undoubtedly, however, these historians often had causes of their own to serve. The constitutional history of Greece, which was originally compiled by various writers of this period, is full of contradictions which distinctly point to theories constructed under the influence of interested motives and in accordance with certain political tendencies. The venerable figures of Solon and Lycurgus, many biographical details concerning Miltiades and Themistocles, have been composed by persons whose motives seldom included any disinterested love of truth. On the other hand, fourth-century historians now approach their work with much more distinct ideas as to the rules of evidence. Xenophon I have already described as one of the characteristic figures of the day. He always betrays a strong tendency in favour of Sparta, and especially his friend King Agesilaus.

Oratory as a branch of literature resting upon formal rules of rhetoric is a creation of this period. The Greeks had

1. RHODES. 2. ATHENS. 3. PANTICAPÆUM. 4. TENEDOS. 5. SICILIAN DECADRACHM.]

always been a rhetorical people. We have noted how, even in Homer, persuasion by the power of speech was a god-given attribute of kings and elders. The Greeks, and the Romans too, went into battle under the influence of oratory as our Highlanders are aroused to martial frenzy by the eloquence of the pibroch. No one doubts that all the speeches in Thucydides’ history are of his own invention, but if they bear any resemblance to the real thing we must believe that the Greek soldier was encouraged, in the fifth century, to fight by a very sober and logical style of speech, including a categorical estimate of the chances in his favour. The modern reader is frequently lulled to sleep by the words of Brasidas or Nikias encouraging his men to battle. Thucydides had, it seems, learnt his peculiarly artificial style of rhetoric from Antiphon, who was the first professional rhetorician to engage in politics. But even Antiphon was content to direct operations through his pupils. In the fourth century the trained professional orator comes forward on the Pnyx as a public statesman, is elected general, and gives orders to the professional soldiers who now command armies and fleets. The profession of the pleader had grown inevitably out of the legal system in vogue at Athens. Where suits were decided by juries numbering hundreds, a rather violent style of pleading had naturally arisen. Although it was necessary by law for the litigants to conduct their own case, it became customary for them to apply to speech-writers like Lysias, Isæus, and Demosthenes for a speech to be learnt and recited as dramatically as possible. We should expect such performances to be highly emotional and to consist largely of oratorical claptrap. That, on the contrary, they are for the most part severely logical, that purple passages are carefully eschewed and references to national feeling kept within limits is the clearest possible proof of the high intellectual standard of the average Athenian citizen who sat upon the jury. It is true that defendants did dress in mourning and produce wives and families in rags and tears to move the sympathies of their judges, but their arguments must be sensible and must include copious reference to the letter of the law. From the so-called “Private Orations” of Demosthenes we obtain rare glimpses of social life at Athens in the fourth century, the banker Phormio who rises to affluence from slavery, who is liberated and marries his master’s daughter, the elegant hooliganism of rich young men who quarrel in camp and assault one another in the Athenian market-place, the extraordinary luxury of Meidias, who rode on a silver-plated saddle, or the quarrels of neighbours in the country about watercourses and rights of way. In a later chapter we shall have to consider the public orations of Demosthenes as the opponent of the Macedonian conquerors. He is unquestionably for European literature the father of oratory. Cicero learnt his art from Demosthenes, and Burke from Cicero. Cleverness is the distinguishing mark of Demosthenes; his style is restrained and logical. I do not think he was morally great, or even more than tolerably honest, but he was so subtle a pleader that I for one always have an instinctive desire to take the other side.

Isocrates, “the old man eloquent,” who died about 338 B.C., is an interesting figure, very typical of his day. He became a professor of rhetoric, and kept a school in which he had a hundred pupils, each of whom paid him 1000 drachmæ for the course. He received as much as thirty talents for writing a single speech. But he was a pure theorist; he scarcely ever delivered his orations, which were written for private reading, and carefully polished for that purpose. Some modern historians discern in him a statesman of wide and lofty views. It is true that he advocated peace, retrenchment, and reform for Athens. It is true also that he spoke in his great Panegyric Oration, a work which had taken him ten years to write, in favour of concerted action by Hellas against the Persians. But I fear that Isocrates as a Panhellenist is a fraud. Panhellenic orations on the text of the Persian wars were a standing dish at the Olympic festival. Gorgias of Leontini, among others, had delivered a similar oration in

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past years. It is surely a proof of the deadness of Panhellenic feeling in Greece that the assembled States could periodically applaud such orations and then go home and sign the peace which the Great King had sent down from Susa. Moreover, the Panegyric itself is written in a very curious tone for a genuine internationalist. He begins very happily: “Athens and Sparta united, shoulder to shoulder, as they stood at Platæa, Athens and Sparta ... yes, but in that order, mind you.... Athens must come first.... Sparta is, and always has been, a bully and a sneak ... don’t you remember ...?” That is the spirit of the Panegyric. Nor is the style really comparable to that of Demosthenes. Carefully constructed as it is, it smells of the lamp; there is a wearisome mellifluousness in its cadences, and a horrid odour of self-consciousness and self-righteousness in its tone.

Turning now to philosophy, we are confronted at once with the problem of Socrates and his real personality.[106] The sage himself wrote nothing, but he has been written of by two immediate disciples, Xenophon and Plato. Between the two we must form our idea of the man. It is likely that Xenophon missed a great deal of the inner meaning of his master’s teaching, but it is certain that Plato used Socrates as a peg for his own ideas with a freedom which could only be tolerated in a country where portraiture was seldom as yet practised as an art. Socrates may be shortly described as a man who went about asking “Why?” It is a habit that we are too apt to repress in children: the Athenians put Socrates to death for it. Remember that it was the age when sophistry--that is, formal profession of superior wisdom--was beginning to be rife, when professors of this, that, and the other were abroad in the streets of Athens. You may reduce any professor to tears by asking him “Why?” with sufficient persistence, especially if you are followed by a train of admiring young men of good family. Socrates was very pertinacious and absolutely fearless. So a jury of Athenian citizens condemned him to drink hemlock on the charge of corrupting the youth with atheistical doctrines. He was certainly not an atheist. He was deeply religious in the highest sense. He objected, or at least Plato did, to the theology of Homer as undignified, in that it exhibited gods laughing and weeping. But he used constantly to speak of “the God,” “the divine principle,” and even of a “Daimonion,” or divine spirit in his own breast. Moreover, Apollo, speaking by the mouth of the Delphic oracle, had declared him to be the wisest of mankind.

In the main, there is no doubt but that the condemnation of Socrates was, like that of Christ, a political move. Both Critias and Theramenes, the foremost leaders of the oligarchic revolution, were among the disciples of Socrates. Both Anytus and Melitus, his accusers, belonged to the democratic reactionaries who had overthrown them. If we may judge by Plato and Xenophon, Socrates was unquestionably a keen critic of the innumerable sophistries upon which democracy was built. With all that, Socrates was a good citizen and patriot. He had fought in many Athenian battles, the soldiers marvelled at his contempt for cold and danger, he had done his best to prevent the unjust sentence upon the generals of Arginusæ, he had incurred the hostility of the Thirty Tyrants.

The trial and death of Socrates present a scene which for pathos and nobility stands, with one other, alone in history. At the first trial he was condemned only by a majority of six. Athenian law permitted him under such circumstances to propose an alternative penalty. He proposed, accordingly, that he should be entertained for the rest of his life at public expense, along with the officers and benefactors of the State, in the Presidential Hall. This Socratic irony was treated by the judges as contumacy, and at the second hearing he was condemned to death by a large plurality of votes. Plato has written of his end in three great dialogues--“The Apology,” “The Phædo,” and “The Crito.” In “The Apology” Socrates concludes his address to the jury with these words: “This only I ask of you. When my sons grow up, gentlemen, if they seem to

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you to be concerned about wealth or anything rather than virtue, punish them, I pray you, with the same affliction as that with which I have afflicted you, and if they pretend to be something when they are nothing, make it a reproach to them, as I have made it to you. If you will do that, we shall have received justice at your hands, I and my sons. Ah, I see it is now time for us all to go hence, me to my death, you to your life. But which of us is going on a better errand--that none can say, but only God alone.”

The dialogue of “Phædo” is perhaps the sublimest thing in literature. It purports to be the last discourse of Socrates to the friends who have come to share his last moments. He preaches the immortality of the soul, the unimportance of death, nay, the urgent necessity of that release from the hampering and deluding trammels of the body, if a philosopher is to see things as they are and enjoy the knowledge of reality. He puts it as a “myth,” using the current Greek mythology of Styx and Hades and Tartarus to enforce his doctrine of Hell, Paradise, and Purgatory. His friend Crito asks for instructions as to his burial.

“‘Bury me any way you like,’ answered Socrates, ‘if you get hold of
me and I don’t escape you.’ He looked at us with a quiet smile and
proceeded: ‘No, sirs, I can’t convince Crito that I am this
Socrates who is now conversing with you. He thinks I am that one
whom he will presently see dead, and he asks, if you please, how he
is to bury me. I have been making a long speech to prove that when
I have drunk the poison I shall not be with you any more, but shall
have gone away to enjoy whatever blessings await the departed; only
I am afraid it is all lost upon Crito, with all my consolations for
myself and you. So you must be my sureties with Crito in a pledge
just contrary to that which he gave to my judges. He went bail that
I would remain here. You must go bail that I shall certainly not
remain, but abscond and vanish. Then Crito will be less afflicted,
and when he sees my body being burnt or buried he won’t grieve for
me as if something unpleasant was happening to me, and he won’t say
at the funeral that it is Socrates he is laying out or burying.’”

Then the story of his painful and courageous death is told in language of extraordinary simplicity and dignified restraint. “Such, Echecrates, was the last end of our companion, as we should say, the best, the wisest, and the justest man of all we had ever known.”

Socrates had done much towards giving Greek philosophy its new trend. The earlier philosophers had been chiefly concerned with the physical universe, trying to discover its origin, and thereby its “principle”; this had been apt to degenerate into that paltry inquisitiveness about mere phenomena which many people are still apt to dignify with the name of “natural science.” Socrates sought not so much the origin as the end of things; he made philosophy concern herself with the nature of reality, and incidentally with ethics and conduct.

The development of ideal philosophy may probably be ascribed, in the main, to Plato rather than Socrates. Perhaps the general English reader will find the simplest exposition of the Platonic theory of Ideas in Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” Put very briefly, it is that the material world apprehended by the human senses is only a copy or pale reflection of the realities “laid up in heaven.” The soul comes into this world

“Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness.”

We recognise the forms of things by their likeness to the patterns apprehended by the soul elsewhere. Thus, as Plato says in the “Meno,” all learning is a process of recollection. The words of St. Paul to the Corinthians are almost a verbal echo of this teaching of Socrates: “For now we see in a mirror darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.”

The doctrines of Plato about Love have been strangely perverted in the popular mind by a singular freak of language in the use of the word “platonic.” They are expounded in two very different dialogues, the almost boisterous “Symposium,”

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where Socrates and his friends agree to diversify the drinking with a series of discourses on Love, and that most exquisite composition called the “Phædrus,” in which Socrates and his friend converse on the same topic as they lie in the shade of a spreading plane-tree upon the grassy banks of the Ilissus.

The human soul, coming from eternity into life, has not forgotten altogether “the sea of beauty” of which it had once enjoyed the vision. All beautiful things remind us of it, and (once more to quote Wordsworth):

“Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.”

Thus all men possess a natural yearning for beauty, however much their glimpses of it may have been darkened and distorted by their earthly experiences, and in their beloved they are seeing the reflection of the reality of beauty. The procreant impulse is part of man’s yearning for immortality; it is out of goodness and beauty that the immortal is to be begotten.

With Plato’s political views as expressed especially in the “Republic” we shall be able to deal more fully in the next chapter, when we come to consider the political theories which arose out of the conditions of the city-state. It is clear that in the hands of men like Socrates and Plato philosophy was usurping the place which according to our notions religion ought to occupy in the minds of men. Greek religion, or at least the official Olympian worship as defined by Homer, Hesiod, and the Tragic Poets, had never attained much influence over the morality of its worshippers. But now philosophy was definitely claiming to teach virtue. Not only sophists like Protagoras and Hippias, but even philosophers like Socrates and Plato, claimed to put right conduct on a basis of reason, and therefore of education. Hence followed the deplorable consequence that virtue was to be for the rich and well-born. Philosophy was snobbish from the start; it finished by excluding all but the select few from any chance of salvation, and, if it had had its way, would have excluded them from any political rights whatever. Socrates seldom discriminates between wise and learned, nor between wise and good. The strength of Greek philosophy is in its earnest opposition to materialism, its proper scorn of base, trivial, and temporary pursuits. But therewith it felt and inculcated a contempt of honest labour, and thereby it drifted farther and farther apart from practical life. For that, of course, the institution of slavery is largely responsible.

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VI

THE MACEDONIAN WORLD

εἴπερ ἴσην ῥώμην γνώμῃ, Δημόσθενες, εἶχες
οὔποτ’ ἂν Ἑλλήνων ἦρξεν Ἄρης Μακεδών.
PLUTARCH.

ALEXANDER AND HIS WORK

The fate of that old god Cronos, supplanted by his own children whom he had tried in vain to devour, is more or less the common lot of all parents of vigorous offspring. The Athenians had a nocturnal festival in which young men ran in relays, each member of the team handing his torch to another, and, as Æschylus says in a fine metaphor, “the first is the victor, even though he be last in the running.” So at this point of our history we begin to be aware of new forces arising in the Greek world, new powers on the fringe of the Hellenic circle now stepping into the light and taking their places in the torch-race of civilisation. Such were Rhodes, the new commercial republic, Caria under Mausolus, Thessaly under Jason, Cyprus under Evagoras, Pergamum under Attalus, the two Leagues, Ætolian and Achæan, and above all Macedon under Philip and Alexander. The stream of culture and intelligence that emanated from Athens and the other ancient cities was now pulsing in the finger-tips of Greece. Many of these new powers are more than half barbarian. They are either monarchies or confederations. What generally happens is that leaders arise who are themselves sufficiently endowed with civilised intelligence to utilise the latent force in a race of untamed and uncivilised warriors. In the military sense the case is that the old powers had grown into the habit of replacing their citizen militias by paid professional soldiers, and their citizens accordingly had grown slack and unwarlike. Rulers like Philip of Macedon were able to raise much larger native levies and to drill them into the professional tactics of the day. Economically it was wealth that told. The old cities were, partly, no doubt through their own lack of foresight, in a state of financial exhaustion, while Philip, by his control of the gold-mines, Attalus and Evagoras by their private wealth, and the Phocians by their sacrilegious seizure of the treasures of Delphi, were still able to bring large forces into the field. The old powers were thus left behind in the race through the force of circumstances beyond their control. In fact, the day of the city-state seemed for a time to be drawing to a close, and larger units, either kingdoms or confederacies, to be taking its place according to their natural superiority.

Modern historians, therefore, suckled on Bismarckism and devoted to physical force, turn aside from the old cities and pronounce them hopelessly degenerate. This is a proposition that deserves examination. In some respects it is false. If it be the mark of historical decadence that the motive power of a race is in some mysterious way paralysed so that invention ceases and no more new forms or experiments are made in culture or politics, then we may assert with some confidence that Greece was not yet even in the third century in such a condition. We shall see something of her new inventions in literature, philosophy, and art in this chapter. In politics the federal systems of Western Greece were distinctly novel and promising. Even in warfare she fought bravely enough at Chæroneia, as she did much later against the invading Gauls. Even Athens, when her dark hour came and she had to submit to garrisons and alien governors, never acquiesced, but rose again and again in rebellion against them. Sparta for a short time in the third century performed the most difficult of all political feats, namely, a reformation and regeneration of herself from within. At Sellasia under Cleomenes III. in 222 B.C. the few Spartans who remained fought against tremendous odds with all their ancient sublime devotion, and died to a man as their ancestors had done under Leonidas. So true is it that moral and spiritual qualities in a people do not come to the sudden end that often befalls a state when it depends for its greatness on material prosperity or physical force.

But the most serious symptom of later Greece was a real racial decline, for which history has no remedy and no mercy, a decline of population. The Spartiate race of Lacedæmon, for example, became almost extinct. There were no more than 1500 of them at the date of the battle of Leuctra, and after that we hear of expeditions containing no more that thirty genuine Spartiates. In a less degree it was the same all over old Greece, and whether it was due to malarial fever or to economic distress, it made the political decline of these states inevitable.

Now it is necessary to go back a little into the earlier part of the fourth century to glance at the rise of Macedon and its conquerors. At the opening of the century Macedon was still almost uncivilised; it was ruled by a monarchy surrounded with an aristocracy of knights very much after the Homeric model. At that time its kings had begun to acquire enough education to mingle a little in Greek politics, and Archelaus in particular had the good taste to invite Euripides and Agathon to his court. Philip II. obtained the throne by suppressing his young ward, the rightful king. At that time Macedon was overrun by wilder barbarians from the west, and it was long before Philip could make head against them. He did so at last by the organising genius which he displayed in remodelling his army, the astute statesmanship with which he made and broke treaties, and still more by the wealth he secured and the use he made of it in bribing his enemies. Philip was, in short, the organiser who occasionally precedes the conqueror and grows the laurels for his successor to wear. Expansion to the west would be difficult and unprofitable. To the east lay the important cities of the Chalcidian peninsulas, the gold-mines of Mount Pangæus, protected by the city of Amphipolis, the rather decrepit kingdom of Thrace, and then the way was clear to the Black Sea and to Asia. Now this was the chosen field of commercial enterprise for Athens and her reviving fleets. A conflict was therefore inevitable.