From Pericles to Philip

Preface

THE period from Pericles to Philip is in many ways the most interesting of Greek history. Indeed, when we use the word "Greek" — whether we think of art or literature, of philosophy or politics, of the Greek spirit or of the Greek attitude to life — nine times out of ten we are turning, consciously or unconsciously, to the century and a quarter between the birth of Pericles and the accession of Philip. It is because in all the regions of thought and life, which I have named, the formative impulses come from this time, or reach maturity in it, recognize themselves or are recognized iji it. But, if we are to understand history, we have to ask, more carefully than we sometimes do, what are the things that matter. In the perspective of time, for instance, how many events of the decade 1850- 60 are yet of such consequence as the publication of The Origin of Species, or have meant so much to mankind? Lecky spoke of John Wesley's conversion as an epoch in English history. Can we imagine the comment of Horace Walpole, or of Dr. Johnson himself, on such a criticism, if it had been made by a contemporary ? Yet it is hard to say that Lecky was not right. But do the histories as a rule give us Such events in a perspective, that will bring out their significance ?

viii FROM PERICLES TO PHILIP

The significant events are not deposited in Historynaked and solitary, like the boulders shed by the icefloes on the Southern shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They come into being in a society with an atmosphere of its own ; and that also is of signal importance, if we are to understand the events. As a rule, they are apt also to be associated somehow with the personality of some man, who in some creative way has helped to make the atmosphere of his day, or who has perhaps reacted against it and becomes himself the impulse for the age following or even for many generations and many races.

The object proposed in this volume is, by attention to Greek life, not in the abstract, but as we find it in traveller and poet, in critic and statesman, as it shows itself in education and the axioms of conduct, in the market and the household, as well as to the political ideas and the decisive events, national and international, to come nearer to an understanding of the period. The relations of Greece with Persia, in particular, are at this time so vital, and, as a rule, have received so little attention beyond side-references in English histories of Greece, that a chapter has been given to Persia, in which, for once, Greece itself plays the second part — second, because, if Persia is the decisive factor in the political history of Greece, Greece is no less for Persia. I have to thank Professor E. G. Browne for his kindness in reading and mending this chapter. I have also to thank my cousin, Mr. F. B. Glover, for expert criticism on my attempt to deal with Athenian shipping and banking.

Three chapters of the book were given, in whole or in part, as Library Lectures in Haverford College,

PREFACE ix

Pennsylvania, in the spring of 1912. The rest has been written since then, partly before and partly after the beginning of the war. Since I sent the manuscript to the publisher, many months have passed ; the delay was inevitable ; and as I have read the proofs I have found new links of sympathy with the men of whom I wrote. Their experience is strangely like what ours has been and will be — the strain of a long war, the readjustment of all life to conditions that raise question and doubt, the endeavour to re-found society and to find anew a base from which the soul can make all its own again. Much that I wrote has been given for me a new meaning ; some allusions, so quick in these last months has been the march of events, seem out of date already. But a true record of human experience is never irrelevant, and the period from Pericles to Philip had above all others great natures and master intellects to interpret it. I hope that my attempt to survey once more what they left may be found honest and sympathetic, and that it may lead some to read them again, and perhaps induce in others a quieter reconsideration of what Greek studies have always meant to us.

Cambridge, Aprils 19 17

Contents

I. The Traveller in the Greek World II. The Age of Pericles .

III. Thucydides

IV. Athens in the War-Time V. Euripides .

Chapter I The Traveller In The Greek World

GOETHE and Eckermann were once talking about Schlegel, and his criticisms of Eiiripides came up, and Goethe, as frequently happened, said something that Eckermann carried home with him and wrote down. " If a modern man like Schlegel," said Goethe, " must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought only to do it upon his knees." Goethe is profoundly right ; the great vice in criticism of ancient literature is that the critic seems more often anxious to find out what is wrong than what is right. Something must be very right indeed in a man's work if it can hold and delight mankind centuries after he is dead and gone, and not only his fellow-countrymen, but every foreigner also, who can even with a lexicon's aid pick out his meaning and who has, consciously or unconsciously, any idea of what a book is. For it is only to the sympathetic, to those who somehow have the right instinct, that a book will reveal itself. Books are strange things and have strange ways — like certain insects, when they feel themselves in wrong hands, they will sham dead. With the great writers of ancient Greece this often happens, and men say they are dull, and find faults in them ; but when they reach the right hands, they change and live and move, and even the barest minimum of Greek will let the right man see that they too are right, and life begins anew with all its gladness and variety.

Herodotus is an author who has suffered terrible things from clever critics in ancient days and in our own. But if ever a writer gave delight to his readers, held their attention, and won their affection, it is Herodotus ; so that it seems clear that he must be more than Plutarch and Professor Sayce would suggest. This chapter will be devoted to the discovery, so far as is possible, of some of those features of his work and character that have stood the test of time, and have endeared him to his readers.

We might begin by speaking of the width of his interests and of his sympathies. He is so intensely human that nothing that touches human life, nothing that quickens men's thoughts, or makes their hearts beat, fails to appeal to him. All the business of all the world is his, and he enjoys it. If, like Greeks of his day, he thinks of human life in the abstract, he may share their doubts of it. " Short as life is," says Artabanus, " there is no man so happy, no man among all these, nor anywhere else, to whom it will not come often, and not once only, to wish to die rather than to live " (vii. 46). " Not to be born is, past all prizing, best," said Herodotus* friend, Sophocles {O.C. 1227) — or rather, so says the chorus in the play of Sophocles, for Sophocles was a poet, and a poet draws many conclusions from life, and in a certain sense the more inconsistent they are the better. But if Herodotus sighs with Artabanus, when he thinks of life in the abstract, when he comes to actual life, whether it is only the bandages the Persians use with the wounded (vii. 181) or the horns of the cattle which the Libyans keep (iv. 183), whether it is the strange practice of making butter that prevails among the Scythians (iv. 2) or the sugar-making — honey, he calls it — of the Libyans, who smear themselves red and eat monkeys (" and they have plenty of monkeys in their mountains," iv. 194) — life is too interesting to be sighed over. There then is one element of his great charm — " the world's no blot for him, nor blank," but various and bright with life, always something to catch the eye and to wake the mind.

Herodotus is thoroughly Greek here. " Oh ! Solon ! Solon ! " says the old Egyptian in the Timaeus (22 b), " you Greeks are always children . . . you are all young in your souls." It is a true judgment. Young they all were in soul, busy, curious, and open-eyed, till they found out how great they were, and grew didactic and dull.

The open eye and heart of Herodotus call down on him the anger of Plutarch — " he is such a lover of barbarians ! " ^ (of/Toj Be (J3i\o^dp^ap6<i iariv) — he says the Greeks learnt their cults from the Egyptians, that Thales was Phoenician by descent, and Isagoras Carian ; he makes Artemisia queen of Halicarnassus, " his own countrywoman," more gifted with foresight than Themistocles ; and he persistently diminishes the glory of the Greeks — Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea, it is all the same story ; and finally he says that the Persians at the battle of Plataea were not inferior in spirit or courage to the Spartans. He loves barbarians ; beware of him, says Plutarch — " the man can write and draw you pictures ; his tale is charming ; there is grace and cunning and beauty in his narratives ... he beguiles and leads astray," and by reviling and insinuation he lessens the glory of Hellas. So Plutarch stands up to him " for our ancestors and for truth." ^ That Herodotus should be accused of making his readers think ill of the Greeks comes strangely to us, till we remember that Plutarch and his contemporaries were exceedingly sensitive to the criticism of the Romans and uncomfortable about any gap in their armour. But his blame for Herodotus as a frienc of the foreigner points surely to another element in Herodotus greatness.

Herodotus was perhaps helped to this power of understanding men of alien speech and alien thought by the ver - circumstances of his birth and upbringing. Halicarnassus, hi ; birthplace, was a Dorian colony from Troezen, planted long ago in Caria (vii. 99).^ As in many of the Greek cities of Asir, Minor there was a strong infusion of Carian blood in th people, and Halicarnassus was in a sense a town apart, excluded from the common worship of the Dorian cities, it:^ neighbours (i. 144). It is noteworthy that critical as Herodotus frankly is of " lonians," for Carians he has perhaps no unkinc' word. That he should write an Ionic dialect seemed to later Greeks to need explanation, and in Suidas' lexicon, which

1 Note also the quite friendly tone of Herodotus in referring to Greek exiles among the Persians — e.g. Demaratus. Cf. Thucydides on Alcibiades and Tissaphernes.

^ Plut. de malignitate Herodoti, §§ 12, 13, 15, 23, 38, 43, and i.

^ The tradition at least was that Troezen was the mother-city. See How and Wells, ad loc. ; also on i. 144, 145, belongs to the tenth century ad., we are told that he learnt the dialect in exile at Samos. But from the evidence of inscriptions modern scholars draw another conclusion — that Herodotus learnt his dialect in his own home from his mother and his nurse, and spoke it from childhood. ^ It is a curious coincidence that the other great contemporary historian of Greece had foreign blood in his veins.

It is interesting to see how Herodotus looks back to his native land. The lonians " had the fortune to build their cities in the most favourable position for climate and seasons of any men we know " ; ^ and the Dorians were not far away. Herodotus is constantly interested in climates — the Egyptians, lie says, are the most healthy of men after the Libyans, partly, he thinks, because of their seasons which do not change, for diseases are most apt to be produced by changes of seasons (ii. 77) ; but after all, while the ends of the earth have allotted to them by nature the fairest things — -gold, cotton, frankincense, and so forth — it is the lot of Hellas to have its seasons far more fairly tempered than other lands (iii. 106, 107). ^ As for the Carians, they gave the Hellenes three warlike inventions — crests on helmets, devices on shields, and handles instead of straps to hold shields with (i. 171) ; and when the lonians first secured the opening of Egypt for the Hellenes, there were Carians with them, bronzen men (ii. 152). Men of war they remained, not easily to be conquered even by the Persians.* The Persian king might be suzerain, but the queen or king at Halicarnassus was half independent. And if we turn to ways of peace, we learn that the old Ionian dress of the women was really Carian, " for the old Hellenic fashion of dress for women was everywhere the same as that we now caU Dorian " (v. 88).

In this Dorian-Carian town, looking from its headland across the sea, Herodotus was born (c. 484 B.C.), and there he grew up, with open ears, we can well believe, from earliest

^ Cf. Meyer, Forsch. i. 197 ; Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece, 649 fi. 2 i. 142. Cf. Strabo, c. 656, on climate of Halicarnassus and its influence ; also Pausanias, vii. 5. 4 ; Radet, La Lydie, p. 48.

* Cf. dictum of Cyrus on relation of land and men, ix. 122 ; and vii. 5, the fair land of Europe and its fruit trees.

* V. 119-121. Carians, XevKaa-mdes (Xen. Hellenica, iii. 2, 15). The Persians, because of their crested helmets, called them cikeKTpvoves (Plut. Artax. 10).

boyhood, for the tales of the men of Halicarnassus — how Agasicles won the tripod at the games of Triopian Apollo and brought it home against the Dorian rules (i. 144) ; how Phanes, a man capable in judgment and valiant in war, served with King Amasis in Egypt, till he quarrelled with the king and fled on shipboard and was caught, but not brought back, for he made his guards drunk, and escaped to Persia, and how he helped King Cambyses across the desert on his march to Eg57pt, and of the horrible vengeance the other Greek mercenaries in Egypt took upon him and were then beaten in battle (iii. 4, n) ; and how Xeinagoras, son of Prexilaos, saved the life of the brother of King Xerxes and laid up thanks for himself with Xerxes, and became ruler of all Cilicia by the gift of the King (ix. 107). But the most famous of all was Queen Artemisia, daughter of Lygdamis, wisest of the counsellors of Xerxes.

"Of the rest of the officers," Herodotus wrote long after, " I make no mention (since I am not bound to do so), but only of Artemisia, at whom most of all I marvel that she took part in the expedition against Hellas, though a woman ; for after her husband died, she held the power herself, and, although she had a son who was a young man, she went on the expedition, impelled by high spirit and manly courage, no necessity being laid upon her. Now her name, as I said, was Artemisia, and she was the daughter of Lygdamis, and by descent she was of Halicarnassus on her father's side, and on her mother's a Cretan. She commanded the men of Halicarnassus and Kos and Nisyros and Calydna, furnishing five ships ; and of all the fleet, after those of the Sidonians, her ships were counted the best ; and of all his allies she set forth the best counsels to the King " (vii. 99).

There was another Lygdamis of whom Herodotus must have heard a good deal in his youth, though he does not mention him. For Artemisia left a son called Pisindehs, and this man's son Lygdamis was tyrant or king of Halicarnassus in his turn. And here we depend on the lexicon of Suidas, and whence that work derived its information we do not know, but much of it can only have come in the long run from Halicarnassus itself.

There was then in Halicarnassus a man named Panyasis, son of Polyarchus, a " seer of signs " and a poet, who revived epic poetry which had now well-nigh died down to ashes. He had a brother called Lyxes, or a sister Rhoio — more probably the former perhaps ; and Lyxes married a woman with a Doric name, Dry 6, and had two sons, Herodotus and Theodorus — theophoric names, both with a hint of piety. The family was one of the better sort {tmv ein^avwv)} Panyasis wrote an epic on Herakles, which some put next Homer, and others after Hesiod and Antimachos, a good deal lower down. For whatever reason Lygdamis saw fit to kill the poet ; and we read that the poet's nephew, and no doubt such others of the family as could get away, removed to Samos. Later on Herodotus came back to Halicamassus and drove out the tjnrant, but afterwards he found himself the object of some iU-will among the citizens, and voluntarily went to Thurii, which the Athenians were then planting. And Suidas concludes with the statement that some say he died there and is buried in the market-place, and others that he died in Pella in Macedonia, for there was a story, which Suidas quotes elsewhere, that Herodotus and Hellanicus lived for a while together at the court of Amyntas, successor of that Alexander of Macedon for whom Herodotus betrays so kindly a feeling in his story.

All this is open to question, but several things are definitely known. Herodotus clearly lived in Samos at some time or other, as his close acquaintance with the stories of Polycrates and other Samians ^ shows — ^he even gives the name of the artist who made the famous ring, Theodorus, the son of Telecles (iii. 41), one of the two men who introduced brassfounding into Greece (i. 51) ; and he pauses (iii. 60) to speak with admiration of three works at Samos, greater than any made by Hellenes — viz. the temple of Hera, the largest temple known, first designed by Rhoecus, son of Philes, a Samian, and spared by the Persians on the suppression of the Ionic Revolt ; the mole round the harbour, twenty fathoms deep and more than two furlongs in length ; and the famous tunnel which carried the water seven furlongs through the mountain ridge. The tunnel is mentioned

^ This view is held by E. Meyer, Forsch. i. 193, and Busolt, who find in Herodotus' remark (ii. 143), icai c/xoi ov yeverjkoyrfdavTi e/xewvrdi/, a

suggestion that he could have unfolded a pedigree — i.e. was of the old nobility.

^ For example, the Samians who distinguished themselves in the Persian side in the battle of Salamis (viii. 85) and were rewarded by Xerxes.

nowhere else in ancient literature, and all trace of it was lost till 1878, when it was found by accident, and some part of it cleared and restored.^

That Lygdamis had trouble with his subjects or fellow-citizens was in any case likely, and it is proved by an inscription now in the British Museum, which Sir Charles Newton found at Halicarnassus.^ Scholars date the stele between 460 and 455 B.C. It contains an agreement between Lygdamis and the citizens of Halicarnassus and Salmakis, relative to the return of exiles and their reinstatement in their lands and houses. A tribute-list setting forth payments made by her allies to Athens in the year 454 B.C. mentions the Halicarnassians among other tributaries — evidence that Lygdamis was gone.^ What part Herodotus had or had not in all these transactions can only be guessed.

But there is no doubt about his sentiments as to tyrants. In a famous passage in his Third Book there stands the discussion of the Persian nobles, who overthrew the false Smerdis, as to the type of government it would be well to establish. Otanes pleads for Democracy.^ " Monarchical power," he urges, " would set even a good man outside the ordinary thoughts " — that sense of limitation and restriction which works for sanity in ordinary intercourse. Plato's myth of the ring that made Gyges invisible shows how Gyges got outside ordinary thoughts. " A tyrant disturbs the customs handed down from of old, he does violence to women, and he puts men to death without trial. On the other hand," continues Otanes, " the rule of the many has a name which is the most beautiful of names. Equality " {irpwrov jxev ovvo/jia irdvrcov koK- Xiarov e-xet laovo/jLiTjv). A German scholar, Maass, has suggested that the whole discussion was quietly taken from Protagoras. Eduard Meyer emphatically rejects this : " Maass makes him outright a Dummkopf." Herodotus himself found the story challenged, for in another passage he refers to people who

^ Cf . Michaelis, Archcsological Discoveries, p. 187; H. F. Tozer, Islands of the Aegaean, ch. viii. ; J. Irving Manatt, Aegaean Days, p. 206.

* Hicks and Hill, Greek Inscr., No. 27. ^ Hicks and Hill, Greek Inscr., No. ^^.

* Herodotus, iii. 80.

would not believe such a debate had taken place, and he produces another fact which he says will astonish them (vi. 43). He evidently believed the story himself.^ It probably came from some of those Persian friends to whom, as we shall see, he owes a great deal of important information, for there were Philhellenes among the Persians as well as among the Egyptians.

But the strong, wholesome democratic flavour of the advice of Otanes is clearly to the historian's mind. When he tells of the liberation of Athens from her tyrants, and then of her great victory on one and the same day over Boeotians and Chalcidians (506 B.C.), and cites the inscription recalling i+ Z" he goes on to add : "It is evident not by one instance only, but in every way, that Equality (la-rjyopir]) is a good thing (cnrovBaLov) ; for the Athenians, while they were under tyrants, were not better in war than any of their neighbours, but, once rid of the tyrants, they became far the first. . . . When once they had been set free, each was eager to achieve something for himself " (v. 78).^ Yet the other two speeches in the Persians' discussion show that Herodotus was not bhnd to the drawbacks of Democracy — few thoughtful lovers of it are — ^nor blind to the advantages of aristocracy and monarchy. The many tyrants mentioned in his pages fare well at his hands ; he is far too much interested in them to be angry with them. Herodotus believed that on the whole more could be made of life under a democracy ; so he was a democrat and a friend of Athens.*

That he took part in the colonization of Thurii is established on the evidence of Aristotle and Plutarch and the general belief of antiquity ; and it is confirmed by his full knowledge of persons and places in Italy and Sicily. To illustrate the

^ Grundy {Persian War, p. 266) remarks that Herodotus had " a certain amount of critical acumen which the extreme simpHcity of his language has a tendency to conceal."

2 Two fragments of it survive, which prove that he saw it in a restored form.

^ Meyer, Forsch. ii. 226.

* A strong love of liberty and democracy is not incompatible with indifference as to the particular constitutional arrangements a democratic community uses at one time or another. Herodotus seems not very clear as to Athenian strategoi and archons, and wrong as to the naukraroi (v. 71 ; vi. 109).

general shape and lie of the Tauric Chersonese he compares it to the promontory of Sunium — " for him, however, who has not sailed along this part of the coast of Attica, I will make it clear by another comparison : — ^it is as if in lapygia another race and not the lapygians had cut off for themselves and were holding that extremity of the land which is bounded by a line beginning at the harbour of Brentesion and running to Taras " (iv. 99). He has tales which he could only have learnt, one might say, among the Italiot Greeks — of Democedes, the Crotoniate physician, who was held in such high honour at the court of Darius, and what difficulty he had in getting away, and of the message he sent to the king that he was married to the daughter of Milon, " for the wrestler Milon had a great name at the king's court " (iii. 125-138) ; of Dionysius, who, after the collapse of the lonians at the battle of Lade, escaped to Sicily and commenced pirate, plundering " none of the Greeks at all, but Carthaginians and Etruscans " (vi. 17) ; of Carthaginian invaders of Sicily and the house of Gelon at Syracuse ; and of the terrible battle in which the Taren tines and their allies from Rhegium lost so many men, the latter three thousand, while of the Taren tines there was no numbering made — in fact, " the greatest slaughter of Hellenes that we know " (vii. 170).

Thus far authority takes us — the youth at Halicarnassus, the troublous times under the tyrant, and the disastrous settlement at Thurii, for the colony was one of Pericles' failures.^ And what happened next ? That is a problem as soon as we touch detail. Thurii was planted in 443 B.C., and Herodotus mentions one or two occurrences in the first two or three years of the Peloponnesian War. If we allow him fifteen years of life after his becoming a Thurian, it is probably all he had. Where we suppose he went depends on a good many things, and there is a good deal of choice. There is his great history and there are his travels — each must have taken a long time. Did he make his travels before he went to Thurii, or after — always disallowing the mean suggestion that a good

^ Thurii : Meyer, Gr. G6sch. iv. 24 ; Diod. Sic. xi. 90, xii. 9 ff., after Timaeus (a Sicilian) ; Strabo, c. 263 ; Plut. Pericles, 1 1 ; Nicias, 5 ; Aristophanes, Nub. 332; Aristotle, Pol. v. 3, 12, p. 1303 a; 7, 9, 12, p. 1307, a. b.

many of his journeys were in other men's books ? When and where did he write his own nine books, and which did he write first ? Did he begin with Book vii., the expedition of Xerxes, and write the others after an interval, in which he travelled ? A good many other questions are bound up with these.

A certain tone, for instance, is to be felt in Books vii. to ix., when Herodotus writes of the gods and other divine beings and their part in the war, which is missed in the earlier books. Does it imply that Herodotus was an orthodox believer when he wrote the war of Xerxes, that he afterwards travelled, and in Egypt became involved in speculations which warred against a conventional orthodoxy ? Or is it possible that a man of open mind and many thoughts, when he came to the great deliverance, felt with so many of his countrymen that the cause lay not in man's valour alone, nor in the wisdom of Themistocles (whom Herodotus did not highly esteem), but beyond — flavit Deus et dissipati sunt ? ^

Then, again, practical questions arise. How far was it possible for a Greek to travel in the Persian Empire before the pacification of CaUias in 448 B.C. ? ^ Egypt in rebellion from 460 to 454 — war in Cyprus again in 449, if it had ever left off for ten years — was it open to a Halicarnassian to go where an Athenian and an Ionian might not — for it seems trade between the interior and the coast cities was interrupted — when Halicamassus was a part of the Athenian Empire, and the particular Halicarnassian an exile and an especially warm admirer of Athens and of Pericles ? ^ What welcome would have waited him in Tyre, the very centre of Persian naval activity against Greece and the fleets of Cimon? To Tyre, he says, he went from Egypt (ii. 44), and in Egypt it is

^ Cf. Herodotus, viii. 13, eVoieerd re ivav vnb tov 6eov okcos av e^KTCodeir] Tm 'EWrjviKM TO HefjaiKov /xr/Se TroXXa ttXcoj/ etrj. Also viii. 109, Speech attributed to Themistocles, rade yap ov< fjfxels Karepyaa-dfieOa dWa 6eoi re Koi rjpaes. Cf. Meyer, iii. § 210. Aeschylus and Herodotus show a feeling that the result of the war was a wonder. Compare what Herodotus says of the terror beforehand, vii. 138, iv deifxari peyaXa.

2 On this question as to Herodotus being able to travel, see How and Wells on vii. 151.

3 We know something of how Athens might treat enemies and enemy property, but next to nothing (if so much) about Persian practice.

THE TRAVELLER IN THE GREEK WORLD ii