Chapter V: Introduction (3)

But even at this, its highest point, the domesticity of Greek life falls far short of modern ideas, and the dignity of the heroes’ wives is somewhat illusory. Possibly the inconsistencies are due once more to the many hands and many successive generations which have had their part in building up the epic. Certainly, for monogamists, the matrimonial ideas of the heroes are far from exclusive. Agamemnon announces his intention of taking Chryseis home, for he likes her better than his dear wife Clytæmnestra, and makes no secret of the position she is to occupy. He does actually take Cassandra home to his wife. In the Odyssey, too, we get a hint of arrangements decidedly Oriental in what Penelope says about her son and the fifty handmaidens. Again, there is a singular contrast between the tender conjugal devotion of Hector and Andromache, or Odysseus and Penelope, and the extraordinary callousness sometimes indicated with regard to feminine charms. It is often remarked as an instance of Homer’s subtlety that he nowhere describes the beauty of Helen, whose face

“Launched a thousand ships
And shook the topmost towers of Ilium,”

only indicating it by making the old men of Troy look at her as she walks past and say to one another, “No wonder that the Greeks and Trojans should suffer pain so long for such a woman. Her countenance is wondrous like the immortal goddesses.” These traditions of the power of love and beauty must belong to the original epic story; for the whole plot of the Iliad, so far as it has a plot, turns on the beauty of Helen, as the whole plot of the Odyssey depends on the love of Odysseus for his wife and the constancy of Penelope. Thus both epics have a basis which might be the foundation of modern romantic fiction. Nevertheless, the spirit of romance is as completely absent from Homer as it is from all true Greek art and literature. Though Agamemnon is very angry at losing Chryseis he has no love for her. Odysseus simply gets tired of the lovely nymph Calypso, and parts from the charming Nausicaa without a pang. Such shocks as these are constantly in store for the modern reader, who is fed upon romance in the nursery.

If we look at the houses in which the domestic scenes of Homer are set we shall find that they are of a simplicity in strong contrast with the elaborate palaces of Crete or Tiryns; and this in spite of the obvious intention of the bard to depict them on a scale of heroic magnificence. They are mainly built of wood. The palace of Paris consists of three parts--_thalamos_, _dōma_, and _aule_. The _thalamos_ is the private part of the house, and contains the marriage-bed of the royal couple. The _dōma_, or _megaron_, is the public hall for meals and receptions. The _aule_ is the court with colonnades surrounding it. Priam had a large family: fifty sons slept with their wives in fifty _thalamoi_ of polished stone built outside his court, while his daughters slept with their husbands in twelve _roofed_ chambers within the court. The palace of Odysseus is more elaborate, and is so intended, for the disguised wanderer says: “Verily, this is the fair house of Odysseus, and easily may it be known and distinguished even among many. For there is building beyond building, and the court of the house is cunningly wrought with a wall and copings, and there are well-fitting double doors.” Standing outside the front door he can perceive by the smell of roast meat that there is a banquet going on. No great magnificence here. In front of the “well-fitting doors” there is a heap of manure, with an aged hound asleep upon it (a similar dung-heap, it may be remarked, graces the court of the palace of Priam in Troy City). Inside the doors there is the _megaron_, where the banquet is going on. Odysseus sits down on the ashen threshold, leaning against a pillar of cypress wood, specially commended for its straightness. Telemachus takes a lump of meat, “as much as his two hands can grasp,” and a whole loaf out of the fair basket, and Odysseus (who is disguised as a beggar) devours it on his dirty wallet as he sits on the threshold. This threshold under the portico of the hall is the regular meeting-place of beggars, and it is there that strangers are put to sleep. Within the hall there is an upper chamber where Penelope sleeps and lives with her maidens. The wooers set up three braziers in the hall to give them light, and heap them with wood and pine-brands; consequently the hall is so full of smoke that the weapons have to be removed to a storeroom to keep them useful. Odysseus, sleeping in the “prodomos” of the hall, can hear a remark made by one of the twelve grinding-women who have their hand-mills in the house next door. Under the same echoing colonnade where Odysseus sleeps goats and cattle are tethered by day. The walls of the hall itself are of wood, the ceiling is of wood, and the floor is of stamped earth, for it is cleaned with a spade, and fires are raked out of the braziers on to the floor. As for the bridal chamber, Odysseus had built it himself with stone, and it contained a marvellous bed wrought by the hero out of a living olive-tree. Finally, there was a rather obscure postern-gate set high in the wall of the hall above a stone threshold, and opening on to an open gallery. Thus the feature of the house of Odysseus is that it is of two stories; otherwise it consists, as usual, of three parts--hall, court, and chamber.

Our learned archæologists have been setting their intellects to the task of making these Homeric houses fit in with the palaces of Mycenæ and Tiryns, but they have found it hard work. They have had to admit that the palace of Odysseus is a good deal simpler than the meanest of the Ægean palaces. And yet our poet has deliberately advertised it as something out of the common. Does not that betray singular poverty of imagination? He could not even make his heroic domiciles as splendid as the actual buildings in which he sang his lays. What should we think of a novelist who professed to write about duchesses and described them as sitting in sumptuous front parlours? Of course we know the explanation. It is hopeless to attempt to synchronise the Homeric age with the ages of Ægean palaces. Homer lived in an altogether lower civilisation as regards wealth and comfort. Just as we saw that his “kings” were only country squires, so his “palaces” are no more than farmhouses, with all their picturesque squalor and simplicity. Dirt and magnificence may go hand in hand, as in our own mediæval halls, but in the Homeric civilisation the magnificence is only in the poet’s heart. His material surroundings are fitly typified by the Dipylon vases.

HESIOD’S WORLD

Hesiod is the Cinderella of Greek poets, neglected alike by editors and schoolboys. And yet once he stood on a level with Homer. He is in reality the complement of Homer, and no picture of the Greek Middle Ages can be complete without him. The Parian Marble sets Hesiod thirty years earlier than Homer, Herodotus places them both about 850-800 B.C. Hesiod’s principal works are two, the “Works and Days” and the “Generations of Gods” or “Theogony.” The “Works and Days” is generally supposed to be a treatise on husbandry, but it seems to be in origin a letter of remonstrance to a wicked brother, Persis, who had ousted Hesiod from his property. The letter is embroidered freely with morals, maxims, and examples from mythology. Persis is exhorted to practise industry and good farming, for which some proverbial hints are given. But the main purport of this curious jumble is the reiteration of complaints against the “bribe-devouring kings”--always in the plural--who have given a corrupt judgment against the poet on his brother’s lawsuit. No one pretends to see real monarchy or anything but oligarchy in Hesiod, yet his rulers are called βασιλεῖς, just as are Homer’s. The “Works and Days” contains also the earliest versions of two most famous legends which together make up the Greek story of creation, the story of how Prometheus stole fire from heaven and the story of Pandora, the Eve of Greek mythology. The chief interest for modern readers lies in a very quaint and curious list of taboos and some personal reminiscences which form, I suppose, the oldest piece of autobiography in existence. He has already described seafaring as a very disagreeable business, to be avoided if possible; he now advises his brother to “wait for a seasonable sailing day, and when it comes, then drag down thy swift ship to the sea, and have a fit cargo stowed away on it, that thou mayest return home with profit; even as my father and thine, most witless Persis, used to make voyages for an honest living. Once he came even to this country, after a long voyage in a black ship from Cyme, in Æolis, turning not from rich resources and prosperity, but from dire poverty, which Zeus gives to men. And he dwelt near Helicon in this beggarly hamlet of Ascra--Ascra, vile in winter, uncomfortable in summer, and good never at all. But do thou, my Persis, be seasonable in all thy doings, but above all in seafaring praise a small ship, but put thy cargo in a great one. The freight will be greater and the profit greater if the winds keep off their dreadful storms. Whenever thou turnest thy rash heart to trade, wishing to escape debt and joyless famine, I will show thee the limits of the thundering main without being skilled at all in seafaring or in ships, for I have never sailed the broad sea in a ship except when I crossed to Eubœa from Aulis, where the Achæans in times long past were storm-bound when they gathered a mighty host from holy Hellas for Troy of the fair women. There did I take passage for Chalcis to try for the prizes of wise Amphidamas” (_i.e._ prizes offered at his funeral games), “the many well-prepared prizes which his lordly sons offered. There I boast to have won the prize for the hymn, and brought home a tripod with handles which I set up to the Muses of Helicon where first they taught me to be a clear-voiced bard. So little trial have I made of well-caulked ships, but still I shall declare the mind of Zeus who bears the ægis, for the Muses have taught me to sing a hymn without bounds.”

Quaint old Hesiod! How like the literary man of all ages! He has never been to sea except on the channel ferry, but in virtue of his literary gifts he is competent to instruct other landsmen in navigation. So by help of the Muses he declares the mind of Zeus--“Never put to sea in a storm!”

Well, this is the reverse of Homer’s medal: the god-nurtured kings frankly revealed as corrupt nobles, the unrelenting toil on the stony farm, the perilous commercial enterprises in small unseaworthy ships, the emigrant returning home to Bœotia in poverty from his Eldorado in Æolis, the superstition, and the pessimism.

III

THE AGES OF TRANSITION

οὐ μὴν οὐδ’ ὑπαρχόντων τούτων ἁπάντων ἤδη πόλις,
ἀλλ’ ἡ τοῦ εὖ ζῆν κοινωνία.--ARISTOTLE.

THE COMING OF APOLLO

“He bringeth to men and women cures for their grievous sicknesses, he giveth the harp, and he granteth the Muse to whomsoever he will; he ruleth his oracular shrine, bringing peace and lawful order into our hearts; he stablished the descendants of Heracles and Ægimius in Lacedæmon and Argos and most holy Pylos.” Such is the Theban poet’s summary of the attributes of the Dorian god. Healing, harp-music and lyric poetry, discipline fostered by the Delphic oracle, and the Dorian government of Sparta, Argos, and Messenia--these are the gifts of Apollo to Greece. There is nothing here to connect him with Nature-worship. He is not even connected with light or sun.

We have already seen something of the earliest strata of religious beliefs on Greek soil. The Ægean worship was principally “aniconic fetishism”--that is, the worship of inanimate, possibly symbolical, objects, such as stones, pillars, crosses, axes, horns, and trees. Then there were animal deities, possibly totemistic in origin, such as the snake-goddess, the dove-goddess, and the bull-man, or Minotaur, powers mainly representing fecundity. There was certainly also ghost-worship; for the dead in the tholos tombs were certainly honoured by sacrifices, and very likely by human sacrifices at first. There seem to have been no temples at all in these stages of religion; it was rather a system of private local cults in great and bewildering variety. But it is certain that the Ægean peoples had developed some wholly anthropomorphic deities before the end. Some of the regular Olympian deities of historical Greece seem to belong partially, and some wholly, to this earlier civilisation. Poseidon, the sea-god, Hermes, the Arcadian shepherd-god, and Demeter or Mother Earth, are of the latter class, with mysterious forms like the Fates, the Curses, the Harpies, and the Sirens. But there was little exclusiveness about ancient religion; new deities are quite readily accepted into polytheistic systems, though in some cases there was a protracted struggle to keep them out. Hesiod remarks that the deities have many names for a single shape, and often a double name reveals assimilation, such as Phœbus Apollo or Pallas Athene. In most cases, indeed, the great name of an Olympian god covers a host of minor deities with varying and sometimes quite opposite attributes. Thus the national Zeus has swallowed up countless local heroes, as when the Laconians worshipped Zeus Agamemnon.

All these processes of change are reflected in mythology. It would seem as if mythologists, or, as we should say, expert theologians, set out to reconcile the people to new forms of worship by inventing delightful stories to account for the change. Homer and Hesiod were doing precisely that sort of work. For example, the introduction of the Northern Zeus was effected by means of a curious myth. It was agreed that he had not always been King of Heaven; formerly his old father Cronos had ruled, he whose wife was the earth. Zeus was born in Crete--that is, he was attached to

an ancient Cretan story of a divine nativity in which a she-goat suckled a babe. That indicates the transition from an animal deity to an anthropomorphic one, just as does the old Mother Wolf of Roman legend. Doubtless some artistic representations of a she-goat and a she-wolf play their part in such stories. Again, Cronos is said to have tried to crush the usurper in the bud by swallowing his dangerous child, but to have swallowed a stone instead. That may cover the transition from stone-and pillar-worship. Still more instructive are the legends of contest between deities for worship at a particular shrine. The ordinary device for the introduction of Zeus was to make him the father of the local hero. “God,” says Voltaire, “first made man in His own likeness, and man has been returning the compliment ever since.” It is the secret of anthropomorphic religion that the worshipper is worshipping himself, or rather an idealised vision of himself projected upon the public conception of his god. The human heart has an unlimited power of thus adapting its faith to its habits. Anthropologists are continually telling us of the persistence of ancient cults in spite of pretended changes of faith, rituals that belong to Artemis transferred to the Virgin, dirges for Adonis transformed into mourning for Christ. Often when the polite antiquarian Pausanias asked the Greeks of his day about the objects of their worship he got conflicting answers. That is how it becomes easy to make converts if you are content to leave ritual unchanged, and that was how Apollo got himself accepted as the young man’s god all over Greece. There was, indeed, a rival young man’s god in Hermes, a very ancient deity. Remnants of antique aniconic worship attach themselves to Hermes: his statues even in classical times are three parts pillar to one part god. He is the shepherd-god of Arcady,[15] and the Arcadians represent more purely than any other peoples of Greece the aboriginal Ægean stratum. Hermes is a god of music too, but his instrument

is the lyre, which in shape and construction resembles the modern mandoline, for the body was made from the shell of a tortoise, an indigenous Greek creature, with a sounding-board of parchment stretched over it. Apollo properly plays on the cithara, or Northern harp. The popularity of Hermes persisted throughout because he became identified with Luck, and Luck is the one god we all worship. He is also associated with commerce; he it is who drives a sharp bargain; and, as we saw, the aboriginal stratum of Greece provided the trading element in the Hellenic races. This attribute the trade-despising warriors of the dominant race turned to his discredit, for poor Hermes in Homer, and generally in literature, becomes a sharper of the worst description. If you ask “Who stole the cows?” the answer is, “Hermes.” He is the messenger of Zeus, but he is also his spy. Hermes, then, was much too strongly planted to be uprooted by the intruding Apollo. But it seems that some male god of the older race was swallowed up and bodily incorporated under that name. For in classical Greece there are two rival Apollos, one the Delian or Cynthian Apollo, the centre of whose cult was the island of Delos, the other the true Dorian god, called Pythian Apollo, and worshipped above all at Delphi. The Delian shrine was a centre of the Ionians, and Delos afterwards became the headquarters of the maritime league of Athens and the Ionian States. Delos boasted itself to have been the god’s birthplace, and mythology presented an elaborate nativity for this Apollo and his sister Artemis. “Homeric” hymns to both Apollos are preserved, and it is interesting to notice how the Ionian bard who is praising the Apollo of Delos mentions all the centres of his worship in a longish list which tallies closely with the list of Athenian allies in the Delian confederacy. But this Delian Apollo is not the important one; in many respects he is only a pale reflection of the other, and his vogue principally depended on the extreme sanctity of the little island of Delos.

The true Apollo is the Northern god who had his home at Delphi. He and his worship play such a prominent part in the making of classical as distinct from prehistoric and heroic Greece that I put him in the forefront of this age of transition. Delphi is one of the most impressive sites in Greece, lying high in a narrow glen with precipitous and almost awe-inspiring crags on every side.[16] Several times in Greek history rash invaders failed to penetrate into this mysterious shrine. The god’s majesty and the terrors of his abode were sufficient protection. It is clear from the mythological presentation of his coming that before Apollo there was already an ancient oracle at Delphi, the source of which was a snake called Pytho. Snakes figure largely in the animistic worship of the old race, as typifying the spirits of the dead issuing from the earth. The myth described how Apollo came and conquered this serpent. He built a great temple in this valley of Parnassus, and took the place of Earth, or Themis, as Pythian Apollo, lord of the Delphic oracle.

Apollo is the most virile god on Olympus, as he is the representative god of the most manly race in Hellas, the Dorians. He is the young athlete god. If we trace the history of his type in art we see him at first a rudimentary male figure, only just evolved out of the pillar shape. He is always nude in these early statues, and it is not easy to say how many of the so-called early Apollos represent the god, and how many are simply statues of male athletes. It makes little difference, for the god and his worshipper are one. At first there is little expression, as in the “Apollo of Orchomenos,”[17] for the artist is still struggling with his stubborn material, happy if his chisel can get the semblance of human shape out of the marble. In the next stage, represented by the “Tenean Apollo,” the sculptor has attained considerable mastery over his tools, and has succeeded in his main object, namely, a faithful expression of the muscles of the male body.[18] The reader will notice “the archaic grin” on the faces of all gods and goddesses of this period. This is probably an attempt to indicate the benevolence of the deity; the god smiles when he intends to grant the prayer of his suppliant. Apollo was always the god of healing; Æsculapius was his son and Hygiæa his daughter. By-and-by the artists learn how to express benevolence less crudely,[19] and all the time they are learning more anatomy and a fuller mastery over their tools, until in the glorious fifth century Alcamenes (who, by the way, was an Athenian) could make a noble figure such as stands calm and powerful, every inch a god, in the midst of battle on the West Pediment of the great temple at Olympia.[20] Study this god. If you can love him you will have learnt the secret of Dorian greatness. He is very simple, serious, and severe; he has the asceticism of a good athlete who knows what discipline means for the sake of his club or country. You must judge him as archaic work, you must allow, when you criticise the stiffness of his hair, for the use of tinting and the crown of gilt bay-leaves which once passed through the hollow underneath his hair. You will perceive that there is something wrong with the angle of his eyelids, which meet without overlapping. Sculptors of the next generation learnt to correct that, but they never conceived a grander figure of the sort of god that a gentleman and a Spartiate might fitly worship. Of course this is not a temple image; it is only one detail of a piece of ornament under the gable at the back of a temple, but it is the conception of a great artist. After that they began to think too much about the beauty of Apollo and young athletes in general, worshipping both with extravagant devotion. Hermes as a more graceful and sensuous young god began to supplant Apollo in the favour of Art. At last we get to the dandified young swell with the elaborate coiffure and the studied

[Ilustration: PLATE XV. “APOLLO,” FROM ORCHOMENUS

_English Photo Co., Athens_]

theatrical pose, the Apollo Belvedere, who seemed to our great-grandfathers the most perfect of Greek statues, though he was carved to suit a decadent taste in the days when Greece had lost the very memory of manliness. Another conflicting, but, I believe, equally Dorian type of Apollo represents him in the flowing and almost feminine robes of a musician. This is Apollo the artist, not the athlete, the Apollo who leads the choir of Muses on Parnassus.

To return to the god and his oracle: the Dorians had planted him at Delphi on their way south about 1000 B.C., and when they had overrun the whole Peloponnesus, except Arcadia and Achaia, occupying the southern islands, including Crete, and overflowing even into the south of Asia Minor, Delphi became their central shrine and oracle. So cleverly was that oracle managed by the Delphic priests that it became the common centre for advice to all Greece, until it formed a sort of focus of Greek nationality. Even semi-barbarian monarchs like Crœsus of Lydia applied to it for advice, and paid for its oracles with lavish dedications. As ambassadors kept coming to Delphi from all parts of the Greek world, the priests had good opportunity of collecting information. They were especially strong in geography, and if a city found its population increasing beyond the extent of its wall space, or if there were a gang of mischievous young nobles to be got rid of, or if the city sought new commercial openings, it would send an embassy to Delphi to consult Apollo about a suitable site for a new colony. After due sacrifices and oblations and various mysterious rites to ensure the proper reverential spirit, they would be introduced into the inmost shrine, where a priestess sat upon a tripod over the identical crack in the ground where the old serpent Pytho had once made his den. Here was a conical stone representing the omphalos or navel of the earth. Then the inspiration would seize the Pythian priestess, she would fall into a kind of fit or trance, caused, they say, by burning leaves of laurel, and in the course of it she uttered wild and whirling words. Before you left the priests would hand you the substance of her remarks neatly composed in rather weak hexameter verses. Very often the advice would turn out excellently, for the priests knew their business. If it did not they could usually point out that their words bore quite a different interpretation if you had had the sense to understand them. Thus Crœsus asked whether he should make war on the growing power of Persia; he was told that if he did he would destroy a mighty empire. After the success of Cyrus, the oracle, of course, explained that Crœsus had in fact destroyed a mighty empire--namely, his own.

The supple intelligence of the Greeks devoted a good deal of its ingenuity to inventing smart _double-entendres_ like this, but I am afraid that the Delphic priests were actually guilty of a good deal of low trickery, though they would hardly have won the national confidence, as they did, if that sort of answer had been their ordinary practice. In politics they played a very important part until the Persian wars, when their more accurate knowledge of external affairs led them to overrate the power of Darius and Xerxes and to counsel submission, whereby they somewhat injured their credit. They formed a sort of international bureau, a sort of Hague, though not always on the side of peace, for the statesmen of Greece. Two institutions in particular made them a much-frequented shrine; one was the Pythian Games, the second in importance of the four great religious and athletic festivals of Greece, and the other was the Delphic Amphictyony. The latter was an international league for religious worship which looked, at times, as if it were going to develop into a real Panhellenic confederacy. Delphi had crept in here, supplanting a much older religious union of neighbours at Anthela. Even in historical times the Amphictyons or their delegates met alternately at the shrine of Demeter at Anthela and at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The meeting was mainly for common worship, but some of the proceedings touched international politics, and there was an old Amphictyonic oath

_Hanfstaengl._]

resembling the Geneva Conventions, in which the members bound themselves not to cut off running water from any other city of the league. Unfortunately, the inveterate feuds of the Greeks often led to the abuse of this league for political ends, and, instead of enforcing holy peace, we often find it waging sacred wars.

We saw that Pindar placed _eunomia_--good order--among the gifts of Apollo. Like Athena, Apollo was greatly interested in political and constitutional systems. In the course of the seventh century, which is the period when Delphi first began to extend its influence, we find the oracle deliberately claiming the authorship of some of the most celebrated legal and constitutional systems of the day. Sparta was not only the chief Dorian State, with a preponderant influence or hegemony over all Southern Greece, but the possessor of the most elaborate and successful political system in the whole country. We can see the Delphic oracle deliberately inserting itself as the founder of this good order. The historian Herodotus got much of his information from the oracle, and he tells us its version, how a certain Lycurgus had come to Delphi to ask for laws and a constitution, and had received it from the god. But the Spartans themselves had not yet been convinced. They still believed that theirs were the true Dorian institutions--as, in fact, they mostly were--dating back to their original leaders, “the sons of Heracles,” and closely resembling those of Dorian Crete. A generation or two after Herodotus the Delphic claim was admitted, for constitutional writers of all parties were glad to accept the sanction of the god for the constitution as they severally interpreted it. Thus Lycurgus, who had originally been an obscure hero with a half-forgotten cult, came to rank as the Spartan law-giver and the author of the remarkable system of life and government which we shall presently describe. They did the same for the famous legal systems of the West, claiming to have inspired Zaleucus, the law-giver of Locri, and Charondas of Catane with their codes. There is some indication of similar proceedings with regard to Solon of Athens, but they met with little success among the rationalistic worshippers of Athena, who was as much a patron of law and order as Apollo himself. Delphi endeavoured to appropriate the wisdom of the Seven Sages, mostly early historical philosophers who belong to these ages of transition. Apollo even claimed the philosophy of Pythagoras, whose name lent itself peculiarly to a supposed Delphic origin. By such means as these the Delphic oracle became the chief sanctuary in Greece, and exerted a very great influence, which, however, some modern scholars have tended to exaggerate.

ATHLETICS

The coming of Apollo and his Dorians meant also a great impetus to the cult of athletics in Greece. The boxers and the bull-fighters of Cnossos prove that athletics were already at home on Greek soil before the Northerners came, and this fact alone should prove that the earlier civilisation was not Asiatic, not at any rate Semitic. But the Achæans and Dorians were also devoted to manly sport. With them it seems to have had from the first a religious significance, especially in connection with funerals and ancestor-worship. In the Iliad the funeral of Patroclus is honoured with sports at his tomb. The programme of this early meeting was an elaborate one. It might be described in modern technical style somewhat as follows:

CHARIOT RACE. First Prize: A blameless, accomplished woman and a
tripod with handles. Second Prize: A brood mare. Third Prize: A new
kettle. Fourth Prize: Two talents of gold. Fifth Prize: A new
two-handled pan.

Antilochus won the toss and took the inner station. In the first
lap there was little in it, but on rounding the turn Eumelus’ team
pushed to the front, with Diomede lying second, close up. Phœbus
Apollo knocked the whip out of Diomede’s hand, whereupon Pallas
Athene responded by breaking the leader’s yoke, the driver being
seriously injured. Result: Diomede 1, Antilochus 2, Menelaus 3,
Meriones 4, Eumelus 0. The fifth prize was awarded to Nestor as the
oldest member present. Menelaus’ objection to Antilochus on the
score of dangerous driving was amicably settled.

BOXING MATCH. Prize: A six-year-old mule. Consolation Prize: A
two-handled cup.

_Mansell & Co._]

Epeius and Euryalus were the only entrants. Epeius was an early
winner, finding the Theban champion’s jaw in the first round and
knocking him out like a fish out of water.

WRESTLING MATCH. Prize: A large tripod, value twelve oxen.
Consolation Prize: A clever woman, value four oxen.

Of the two wrestlers Ajax showed superior strength, but Odysseus
was more than his match in science. This seems to have been a
regular rough-and-tumble, both champions being pinched black and
blue; there was nothing to choose between them, and after a
ding-dong struggle the match was declared a draw.

FOOT-RACE. First Prize: Handsome silver punch-bowl of Sidonian
make. Second Prize: Fat ox. Third Prize: Half a talent of gold.

Odysseus, none the worse for his recent encounter, entered in a
field of three. Ajax son of Oileus was first off the mark, closely
followed by Odysseus. The latter, unable to get on terms with his
speedier rival, prayed to Pallas Athene for help. On nearing the
prizes Ajax fell, and Odysseus was declared the winner. The
objection lodged by Ajax on the ground of celestial interference
was dismissed with ridicule.

SHAM DUEL. Prize: The armour of Sarpedon.

Diomede and Telamonian Ajax were so evenly matched that this event
also was pronounced a draw.

PUTTING THE WEIGHT. Prize: A lump of natural iron.

Polypoetes won this event with a record put, amid general
enthusiasm.

ARCHERY. First Prize: Ten double axes. Second Prize: Ten single
axes.

The mark was a dove tied to a mast. Teucer won the toss and took
first shot, missing his bird, but cutting the string by which it
was attached. Thereupon Meriones snatched the bow, and, vowing a
hecatomb to Apollo, pierced the dove to the heart, thus proving his
title to the first prize.

JAVELIN-THROWING. First Prize: Ornamental cauldron, value one ox.
Second Prize: Javelin.

Agamemnon walked over.

Even in the account of these games it seems very probable that there has been a process of accumulation in which later bards have added events according to their fancy. Some of the later encounters are described with much less vigour and skill than the earlier. It is, however, important to notice that from the very first Greek athletics were part of religion. They were undertaken in a serious, devotional spirit, to honour some god or defunct hero. It was the same with poetry. Epic was, of course, devoted to the gods and heroes. The early lyric was also in the main devotional, whatever its subject might be. We have seen Hesiod carrying his poetic talents to a contest in song arranged to honour the funeral of

Amphidamas. Tragedy, it is now said, developed out of funeral choruses. It appears also that the great games of Delphi--the Pythian Games--developed from a musical contest. The histories of Herodotus are said to have been declaimed at the Olympic Games, and orators would in later times make them the occasion for Panhellenic orations. There was no divorce between intellect and muscle among the Greeks. Each was a necessary part of _areté_, the quality of the perfect man. Sport-loving people as we are, there is nothing in all literature so hard for us to comprehend as the work of Pindar, the Bœotian poet of the early fifth century. His professional business was only the writing of the Epinikia, songs and music in celebration of athletic contests at the great games, Pythian, Nemean, Isthmian, and Olympic. But the spirit in which he approaches his task is that of a man writing about the most solemn and important achievements in the world. He assumes that success in a boys’ wrestling match or a mule-race is an episode in the history of the successful athlete’s country, and does not find it inappropriate to speak of the gods and heroes in the same breath. “Far and wide shineth the glory of the Olympian Games, the glory that is won in the races of Pelops, where swiftness of foot contends, and feats of strength, hardy in labour. All his life long the victor shall bask in the glory of song for his prize. Daily continued blessedness is the supreme good for every man.” We cannot understand the devotional spirit of Pindar unless we realise that the Greeks dedicated their bodily strength and grace to the honour and service of heaven. The Hebrew praised Jehovah in dance and song; the Greek honoured Zeus and Apollo with wrestling and races and the beauty of trained bodies.

The Olympian Games[21] had originally belonged to the service of local heroes, Œnomaus and Pelops, but as they gained in popularity Father Zeus took them under his ægis. Apollo was said to have outrun Hermes in a race there and to

_English Photo Co._]

have beaten Ares in boxing. The traditional date for the founding of the festival was 776 B.C., and that became the era from which all Greek dates were subsequently settled. But the actual date has no special significance: in origin the games were much older, and their great importance begins a good deal later--begins, in fact, with the real hegemony of Sparta. Though the games were not in Spartan territory it was undoubtedly from Spartan support that their importance arises.

At first the only contest was a foot-race, but various events were added until at last five days were necessary for the whole meeting. The most important contests were the following: (1) Short foot-race; (2) double course; (3) long foot-race; (4) wrestling; (5) pentathlon, consisting of five feats, long jump, foot-race, quoit-throwing, javelin-throwing, wrestling; (6) boxing; (7) four-horse chariot-race; (8) pancration, a mixture of boxing and wrestling--in fact, a combat between two naked unarmed men, with scarcely any rules; (9) horse-race; (10) hoplite-race for soldiers in full armour. Besides these there were six special events for boys and various other contests, such as mule-races and trotting races, which did not become permanent fixtures. There was a regular competition for heralds and trumpeters.

Sacrifice and ritual accompanied every stage of the proceedings. Before the meeting, which took place every four years, ambassadors went from city to city proclaiming a Sacred Truce. All people who could prove Greek nationality were invited. From its situation Olympia naturally attracted support from the flourishing communities of Sicily and South Italy. Whether they sent competitors or not, most of the States would send embassies to the festival, and a great point was made of their lavish equipment. The judges were chosen by lot from the citizens of Elis, who managed the contest; they received a ten months’ course of instruction beforehand in the duties of their office. All the competitors had to undergo a strict examination as to their qualifications, and to take an oath on the altar of Zeus that they would compete fairly and that they had been in training for the previous ten months. The only prize was a crown of wild olive, cut from a certain tree of special sanctity, but the victor’s name and country were proclaimed to the assembled multitude and the highest honours awaited him on his return. He was welcomed in procession, led in through a breach specially made in the wall of his city, and granted immunities from taxation, or, as at Athens, free meals in the Presidential House for all his life. The chariot-races were especially the object of ambition and the opportunity for display to the wealthy. Tyrants of Syracuse competed in them, but the brilliant Athenian Alcibiades outstripped all competitors by sending in no fewer than seven teams.

Although the prize was but a spiritual one, we cannot say that the contests were always conducted in what we should call a spirit of pure amateur sport. Perhaps the incentive to trickery was excessively great. Anyhow, there stood at Olympia an ominous row of statues dedicated to Zeus which had been set up as fines by athletes guilty of discreditable practices, generally of the kind we associate with the “pulling” of horses. But when it is considered that the Olympian Games continued in an almost unbroken series for twelve centuries--that is, until the Emperor Theodosius abolished them in A.D. 393--the list of such irregularities is not unduly long.

In the very minute account of Olympia which we owe to the traveller Pausanias there are some curious and interesting anecdotes of the games. For example, he saw the statue of the boy Pisirodus, who was brought to the Olympian Games by his mother disguised as a trainer, because no women were allowed to be present. “They say that Diagoras came with his sons Acusilaus and Damagetus to Olympia, and when the young men had won their prizes they carried their father through the assembly, while the people pelted him with flowers and called him happy in his children.” Then there is Timanthes, the strong man, who won the pancration. “He had ceased practising as an athlete, but still he continued to test his strength by bending a mighty bow every day. Well, he went away from home, and while he was away his practice with the bow was discontinued. But when he came back and could no longer bend his bow he lit a fire and flung himself on the flames.” There is the plough-boy Glaucus, whose father noticed him one day fitting the ploughshare into his plough with his fist instead of a hammer. His father thereupon took him to Olympia to box, but as he had no skill in boxing he was badly punished and almost beaten. Suddenly his father called out, “Give him the plough-hammer, my boy!” Whereupon he knocked his adversary out, won the prize, and became a famous pugilist. “The mare of the Corinthian Phidolas was named Aura; at the start she happened to throw her rider, but continuing, nevertheless, to race in due form, she rounded the turning-post, and on hearing the trumpet quickened her pace, reached the umpires first, knew that she had won, and stopped.”

That there was a good deal of extravagance in the cult of athletes was not likely to escape the critical eye of a people who so detested extravagance in any form. The outspoken Euripides had a violent tirade against athletes in his satyric drama _Autolycus_. “It is folly,” he says, “for the Greeks to make a great gathering to see useless creatures like these, whose god is in their belly. What good does a man do to his city by winning a prize for wrestling or speed or quoit-heaving or jaw-smiting? Will they fight the enemy with quoits? Will they drive the enemy out of their country without spears by kicking? No one plays antics like these when he stands near the steel. Garlands of leaves should be for the wise and good, for the just and sober statesman who guides his city best, for the man who with his words averts evil deeds, keeping battle and civil strife away. Those are the real boons for every city and all the Greeks.” Twenty-three centuries stand between this and “The flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf at the goal.” I fear that Euripides got no more attention than Mr. Kipling.

As with us, professionalism grew upon them in later days. The old ideals of bodily grace and all-round excellence were deserted. In their place the boxing and pancration encouraged a coarse type of heavy-weight bruiser. The training and meals of the athletes became a by-word in vegetarian Greece, and romantic sporting reporters enlarged upon the gastronomic feats of the famous athletes.

Athleticism, however, gave one thing to the Greeks that we lack. It was from the models in the palæstra and the stadium that the sculptors of Greece drew their inspiration. It was of course an immense benefit to that art to be able to see the stripped body at exercise in the sunlight, and that, coupled with the natural Greek sense of form, is the secret of the unchallenged supremacy of Greek sculpture. Perfect anatomy of the body was achieved even before the face could be properly rendered. The nude male figure was the favourite theme of fifth-century art, and extraordinary perfection was reached by Myron and Polycleitus. Myron’s “Discobolus” is, of course, one of the best known of ancient statues. Myron, an Athenian artist, is an elder contemporary of Pheidias, and therefore belongs to the earlier stages of the great period. But he had already begun to feel the artist’s sense of mastery over his material, and he delighted in rather strained poses, therein starting a tendency for sculpture which would surely have led to a premature

_Anderson_

FIG. 1. THE “DISCOBOLUS” OF MYRON

_Mansell & Co._

FIG. 2. THE “DIADUMENUS” OF POLYCLEITUS

PLATE XIX]

decadence if it had not been for the extraordinary genius of the inspired Pheidias. My illustration gives one of many modern examples of this much-copied statue.[22] But it is leagues removed from the original bronze. The “Discobolus” is an instantaneous photograph of an athlete just poising the heavy disk and preparing to throw. In another moment he will turn right-about on the pivot of his right foot. There are few statues of the fifth century which thus select an instant out of a series of movements. For athlete statues two types stand pre-eminent. One is the athlete[23] just fastening the diadem upon his victorious brow (“Diadumenus”), a type due to Polycleitus, whose examples of figure-drawing were taken even by the Greeks as “classics”--that is, as models of perfection in the direction attempted. His “Doryphorus”[24] was known as “the Canon,” as being a model of proportion, on which subject Polycleitus wrote a treatise. Unfortunately we are compelled here again to rely upon inferior marble copies of an original in bronze, copies which probably do injustice to their model in exaggerating its heaviness and muscularity. The other fine athletic type is that of the “Apoxyomenus,” the athlete engaged with the strigil in scraping off the oil with which all athletes, and especially wrestlers, were anointed.[25] Of all statues dealing with athletics one of the most impressive is the bronze charioteer lately discovered by the French at Delphi. There is a wonderful calm and dignity about the long-robed figure.[26]

To be naked and unashamed was one of the glories of the cultivated Greek. It astonished (and still shocks) the barbarian. When Agesilaus, the Spartan king, was fighting on Persian soil he caused his Oriental captives to be exhibited naked to his men, in order that they might have no more terror of the great king’s myriads. Alone among civilised peoples of the earth the ancient Greek dared to strip his body to the sun, and this too, as Thucydides witnesseth, came from the manly city. “The Lacedæmonians,” he says, “were the first to use simple raiment of the present style, and in other respects were the first to adopt a similar scale of living for rich and poor. They were the first to strip and undress in public, for anointing with oil after exercise. Originally the athletes used to wear loin-cloths about their middles even at the Olympic Games, and that practice has not long been discontinued” (actually in 720 B.C.). “Even now some of the barbarians, especially the Asiatics, continue to wear clothes at contests of boxing and wrestling. One might point to several other analogies between the customs of ancient Greece and modern barbarism.” With female nudity the case is different. Although the girls of Sparta used to strip for their gymnastic exercises, that was a notorious Spartan idiosyncrasy. It is only under foreign influence and in the later periods that feminine nudity is exhibited in Greek art. Hear Plato on the subject: Socrates has been led by the logic of his argument into the assertion that the women of the Ideal Republic ought to be educated just like the men, to go through the semi-military training of the wrestling school and the gymnasium along with them. The only objection he can see to such a course is that the public exercises of women would appear _ridiculous_ to the Athenians of his day. That objection he dismisses as follows:

“Well, then,” says Socrates, “as we have begun the argument we must take the rough with the smooth, and we must beg the wits to leave their usual trade and be serious. They must remember that it is not very long since it seemed to the Greeks ugly and ridiculous that men should appear naked, as it does now to most of the barbarians. And when the Cretans first, and after them the Lacedæmonians, began their stripped exercises the wits of the day had occasion to make fun of such things. Don’t you suppose they did?”

“I do indeed.”

“But when experience showed that it was better to strip than to cover the body, what the eye thought ridiculous was

_Alinari_

FIG. 2. THE “APOXYOMENUS”

PLATE XX]

overwhelmed by what logic declared to be best, and it became apparent that it is only a fool who thinks anything ridiculous, except what is evil.”

SPARTA

We turn naturally from Apollo and his Dorians to the headquarters of the Dorian race, where all the strength and weakness of the Dorian character is revealed at its highest and lowest. As the most important part of Greek history consists of the long duel between Sparta and Athens, and all our literature comes from Athens, posterity naturally tends to take sides against Sparta. And yet all those writers, from Herodotus to Aristotle, had a very real admiration for Sparta. Liberals, on the other hand--and we are all Liberals nowadays--dislike Sparta, as representing oligarchy against democracy and as having sold the liberty of Greece to the Persians. And yet the Spartans practised equality, which the Athenians praised, as no people on earth have ever practised it, and in selling Greece to Persia they were only bidding against Athens. Other people despise Sparta as the one Greek people which contributed hardly anything to literature and art. And yet she is the most typically Greek of all Greek states. The fact is that she is a paradox. One of the chief interests of Greek history is the extraordinary psychological contrast between the two chief actors. Sparta is the antithesis of Athens, and yet, if any one would know Greece, he must realise that both are essentially and characteristically Greek. Each is the complement of the other. Without Sparta Greece would lack its most remarkable figure in the realm of politics, as well as its chief bulwark in land warfare. These are the two sides of Sparta on which we ought to fix our attention--the political system which gave her the best, or at any rate the most stable, government in Greek history, and the military education and discipline which gave her the finest army.

Politically, all the Greek states, whether democracies or oligarchies, rest upon a double structure of council and assembly. In democracies the assembly is based on a very wide franchise, and possesses the actual control of the state, the council being limited to subordinate functions, executive and deliberative. At Athens, as we shall see, the council is more like a committee to prepare business for the assembly. In oligarchies, on the other hand, the assembly consists of a comparatively small and select body of richer or nobler citizens, while the actual government is in the hands of the council. Sparta contained both these elements: an assembly of all the warriors, or Spartiates, with full rights, though these were comparatively a small proportion of the population of Laconia, and a _Gerousia_, or Senate, of thirty elders. But Sparta, though ranked as an oligarchy by the general opinion of Greece, was not, as Aristotle saw, a true or typical oligarchy. In the first place, the ruling council of regular oligarchies generally consisted of a close corporation co-opting its members, while the Spartan _gerontes_ were elected by the whole body of the full citizens. In the second place, Sparta had developed an executive magistracy, which had far more real share in the direction of the state than either the Senate or the Assembly. This perhaps was the secret of their efficient and stable government, for most Greek states had such a dread of personal ascendancy that they sacrificed unity and efficiency of administration by placing their executive magistracies in a position wholly subordinate. It was not so at Sparta. There they had retained a kingship from the early times of the Dorian invasion right through their history, as no other really Greek State was able to do. They had two kings descending in parallel dynasties from prehistoric times, or, as they put it, from two Heracleid families. The origin of this double kingship is really lost in antiquity, though there are many theories about it, both ancient and modern. The most probable is that of two separate bands of Dorian invaders, each under its own king, uniting to conquer the valley of the Eurotas, and combining to form the state. In reviewing the kingship of Greek history Aristotle places this Spartan system

_Mansell & Co._]