XXVI. IMPERIAL ATHENS UNDER PERICLES…

XXVI. IMPERIAL ATHENS UNDER PERICLES

Athens the stately-walled, magnificent!--PINDAR.

[Sidenote: [460-430 B.C.]]

The judicial alterations effected at Athens by Pericles and Ephialtes, described in a preceding chapter, gave to a large proportion of the citizens direct jury functions and an active interest in the constitution, such as they had never before enjoyed; the change being at once a mark of previous growth of democratical sentiment during the past, and a cause of its further development during the future. The Athenian people were at this time ready for any personal exertion. The naval service especially was prosecuted with a degree of assiduity which brought about continual improvement in skill and efficiency; while the poorer citizens, of whom it chiefly consisted, were more exact in obedience and discipline than any of the more opulent persons from whom the infantry or the cavalry were drawn. The maritime multitude, in addition to self-confidence and courage, acquired by this laborious training an increased skill, which placed the Athenian navy every year more and more above the rest of Greece: and the perfection of this force became the more indispensable as the Athenian empire was now again confined to the sea and seaport towns; the reverses immediately preceding the Thirty Years’ Truce having broken up all Athenian land ascendency over Megara, Bœotia, and the other continental territories adjoining to Attica.

Instead of trying to cherish or restore the feelings of equal alliance, Pericles formally disclaimed it. He maintained that Athens owed to her subject allies no account of the money received from them, so long as she performed her contract by keeping away the Persian enemy, and maintaining the safety of the Ægean waters. This was, as he represented, the obligation which Athens had undertaken; and provided it were faithfully discharged, the allies had no right to ask questions or institute control. That it was faithfully discharged no one could deny: no ship of war except those of Athens and her allies was ever seen between the eastern and western shores of the Ægean. An Athenian fleet of sixty triremes was kept on duty in these waters, chiefly manned by Athenian citizens, and beneficial as well from the protection afforded to commerce as for keeping the seamen in constant pay and training. And such was the effective superintendence maintained, that in the disastrous period preceding the Thirty Years’ Truce, when Athens lost Megara and Bœotia, and with difficulty recovered Eubœa, none of her numerous maritime subjects took the opportunity to revolt.

The total of these distinct tributary cities is said to have amounted to one thousand, according to a verse of Aristophanes, which cannot be under the truth, though it may well be, and probably is, greatly above the truth. The total annual tribute collected at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, and probably also for the years preceding it, is given by Thucydides at about six hundred talents [£120,000 or $600,000]. Of the sums paid by particular states, however, we have little or no information. It was placed under the superintendence of the Hellenotamiæ; originally officers of the confederacy, but now removed from Delos to Athens, and acting altogether as an Athenian treasury-board. The sum total of the Athenian revenue, from all sources, including this tribute, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War is stated by Xenophon at one thousand talents: customs, harbour, and market-dues, receipt from the silver mines at Laurium, rents of public property, fines from judicial sentences, a tax per head upon slaves, the annual payment made by each metic, etc., may have made up a larger sum than four hundred talents; which sum, added to the six hundred talents from tribute, would make the total named by Xenophon. But a verse of Aristophanes, during the ninth year of the Peloponnesian War, B.C. 422, gives the general total of that time as “nearly two thousand talents”: this is in all probability much above the truth, though we may reasonably imagine that the amount of tribute money levied upon the allies had been augmented during the interval. Whatever may have been the actual magnitude of the Athenian budget, however, prior to the Peloponnesian War, we know that during the larger part of the administration of Pericles, the revenue including tribute, was so managed as to leave a large annual surplus; insomuch that a treasure of coined money was accumulated in the Acropolis during the years preceding the Peloponnesian War--which treasure when at its maximum reached the great sum of ninety-seven hundred talents [£1,940,000 or $9,700,000], and was still at six thousand talents, after a serious drain for various purposes, at the moment when that war began. This system of public economy, constantly laying by a considerable sum year after year--in which Athens stood alone, since none of the Peloponnesian states had any public reserve whatever--goes far of itself to vindicate Pericles from the charge of having wasted the public money in mischievous distributions for the purpose of obtaining popularity; and also to exonerate the Athenian demos from that reproach of a greedy appetite for living by the public purse which it is common to advance against them. After the death of Cimon, no further expeditions were undertaken against the Persians, and even for some years before his death, not much appears to have been done. The tribute money thus remained unexpended, and kept in reserve, as the presidential duties of Athens prescribed, against future attack, which might at any time be renewed.

Though we do not know the exact amount of the other sources of Athenian revenue, however, we know that tribute received from allies was the largest item in it. And altogether the exercise of empire abroad became a prominent feature in Athenian life, and a necessity to Athenian sentiment, not less than democracy at home. Athens was no longer, as she had been once, a single city, with Attica for her territory: she was a capital or imperial city--a despot-city, was the expression used by her enemies, and even sometimes by her own citizens--with many dependencies attached to her, and bound to follow her orders. Such was the manner in which not merely Pericles and the other leading statesmen, but even the humblest Athenian citizen, conceived the dignity of Athens; and the sentiment was one which carried with it both personal pride and stimulus to patriotism.

To establish Athenian interests in the dependent territories, was one important object in the eyes of Pericles, and while he discountenanced all distant and rash enterprises, such as invasion of Egypt or Cyprus, he planted out many cleruchies and colonies of Athenian citizens intermingled with allies, on islands and parts of the coast. He conducted one thousand citizens to the Thracian Chersonese, five hundred to Naxos, and two hundred and fifty to Andros. In the Chersonese, he further repelled the barbarous Thracian invaders from without, and even undertook the labour of carrying a wall of defence across the isthmus, which connected the peninsula with Thrace; since the barbarous Thracian tribes, though expelled some time before by Cimon, had still continued to renew their incursions from time to time. Ever since the occupation of the elder Miltiades, about eighty years before, there had been in this peninsula many Athenian proprietors, apparently intermingled with half-civilised Thracians: the settlers now acquired both greater numerical strength and better protection, though it does not appear that the cross-wall was permanently maintained. The maritime expeditions of Pericles even extended into the Euxine Sea, as far as the important Greek city of Sinope, then governed by a despot named Timesileus, against whom a large proportion of the citizens were in active discontent.

Lamachus was left with thirteen Athenian triremes to assist in expelling the despot, who was driven into exile with his friends: the properties of these exiles were confiscated, and assigned to the maintenance of six hundred Athenian citizens, admitted to equal fellowship and residence with the Sinopians. We may presume that on this occasion Sinope became a member of the Athenian tributary alliance, if it had not been so before: but we do not know whether Cotyora and Trapezus, dependencies of Sinope further eastward, which the ten thousand Greeks found on their retreat fifty years afterwards, existed in the time of Pericles or not. Moreover, the numerous and well-equipped Athenian fleet, under the command of Pericles, produced an imposing effect upon the barbarous princes and tribes along the coast, contributing certainly to the security of Grecian trade, and probably to the acquisition of new dependent allies.

It was by successive proceedings of this sort that many detachments of Athenian citizens became settled in various portions of the maritime empire of the city--some rich, investing their property in the islands as more secure (from the incontestable superiority of Athens at sea) even than Attica, which since the loss of the Megarid could not be guarded against a Peloponnesian land invasion--others poor, and hiring themselves out as labourers. The islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros, as well as the territory of Histiæa, on the north of Eubœa, were completely occupied by Athenian proprietors and citizens: other places were partially so occupied. And it was doubtless advantageous to the islanders to associate themselves with Athenians in trading enterprises, since they thereby obtained a better chance of the protection of the Athenian fleet. It seems that Athens passed regulations occasionally for the commerce of her dependent allies, as we see by the fact that, shortly before the Peloponnesian War, she excluded the Megarians from all their ports. The commercial relations between Piræus and the Ægean reached their maximum during the interval immediately preceding the Peloponnesian War. Nor were these relations confined to the country east and north of Attica: they reached also the western regions. The most important settlements founded by Athens during this period were, Amphipolis in Thrace and Thurii in Italy. Amphipolis was planted by a colony of Athenians and other Greeks, under the conduct of the Athenian Agnon, in 437 B.C. It was situated near the river Strymon in Thrace, on the eastern bank, and at the spot where the Strymon resumes its river-course after emerging from the lake above.

The colony of Thurii on the coast of the Gulf of Tarentum in Italy, near the site and on the territory of the ancient Sybaris, was founded by Athens about seven years earlier than Amphipolis, not long after the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ Truce with Sparta, 443 B.C.

The fourteen years between the Thirty Years’ Truce and the breaking out of the Peloponnesian War, are a period of full maritime empire on the part of Athens--partially indeed resisted, but never with success. They are a period of peace with all cities extraneous to her own empire; and of splendid decorations to the city itself, emanating from the genius of Phidias and others, in sculpture as well as in architecture. Since the death of Cimon, Pericles had become, gradually but entirely, the first citizen in the commonwealth. His qualities told for more, the longer they were known, and even the disastrous reverses which preceded the Thirty Years’ Truce had not overthrown him, since he had protested against that expedition of Tolmides into Bœotia out of which they first arose. But if the personal influence of Pericles had increased, the party opposed to him seems also to have become stronger than before; and to have acquired a leader in many respects more effective than Cimon--Thucydides, son of Melesias.

The new chief was a relative of Cimon, but of a character and talents more analogous to those of Pericles: a statesman and orator rather than a general, though competent to both functions if occasion demanded, as every leading man in those days was required to be. Under Thucydides, the political and parliamentary opposition against Pericles assumed a constant character and organisation such as Cimon, with his exclusively military aptitudes, had never been able to establish. The aristocratical party in the commonwealth--the “honourable and respectable” citizens, as we find them styled, adopting their own nomenclature--now imposed upon themselves the obligation of undeviating regularity in their attendance on the public assembly, sitting together in a particular section, so as to be conspicuously parted from the demos. In this manner, their applause and dissent, their mutual encouragement to each other, their distribution of parts to different speakers, was made more conducive to the party purposes than it had been before when these distinguished persons were intermingled with the mass of citizens. Thucydides himself was eminent as a speaker, inferior only to Pericles--perhaps hardly inferior even to him.

Such an opposition made to Pericles, in all the full license which a democratical constitution permitted, must have been both efficient and embarrassing. But the pointed severance of the aristocratical chiefs, which Thucydides, son of Melesias, introduced, contributed probably at once to rally the democratical majority round Pericles, and to exasperate the bitterness of party conflict. As far as we can make out the grounds of the opposition, it turned partly upon the pacific policy of Pericles towards the Persians, partly upon his expenditure for home ornament. Thucydides contended that Athens was disgraced in the eyes of the Greeks by having drawn the confederate treasure from Delos to her own Acropolis, under pretence of greater security--and then employing it, not in prosecuting war against the Persians, but in beautifying Athens by new temples and costly statues. To this Pericles replied that Athens had undertaken the obligation, in consideration of the tribute-money, to protect her allies and keep off from them every foreign enemy,--that she had accomplished this object completely at the present, and retained a reserve sufficient to guarantee the like security for the future,--that under such circumstances she owed no account to her allies of the expenditure of the surplus, but was at liberty to employ it for purposes useful and honourable to the city. In this point of view it was an object of great public importance to render Athens imposing in the eyes both of the allies and of Hellas generally, by improved fortifications,--by accumulated embellishment, sculptural and architectural,--and by religious festivals, frequent, splendid, musical, and poetical.

Such was the answer made by Pericles in defence of his policy against the opposition headed by Thucydides. And considering the ground of the debate on both sides, the answer was perfectly satisfactory. For when we look at the very large sum which Pericles continually kept in reserve in the treasury, no one could reasonably complain that his expenditure for ornamental purposes was carried so far as to encroach upon the exigencies of defence. What Thucydides and his partisans appear to have urged, was that this common fund should still continue to be spent in aggressive warfare against the Persian king, in Egypt and elsewhere--conformably to the projects pursued by Cimon during his life. But Pericles was right in contending that such outlay would have been simply wasteful; of no use either to Athens or her allies, though risking all the chances of distant defeat, such as had been experienced a few years before in Egypt.

So bitter however was the opposition made by Thucydides and his party to this projected expenditure--so violent and pointed did the scission of aristocrats and democrats become--that the dispute came after no long time to that ultimate appeal which the Athenian constitution provided for the case of two opposite and nearly equal party-leaders--a vote of ostracism. Of the particular details which preceded this ostracism, we are not informed; but we see clearly that the general position was such as the ostracism was intended to meet. Probably the vote was proposed by the party of Thucydides, in order to procure the banishment of Pericles, the more powerful person of the two and the most likely to excite popular jealousy. The challenge was accepted by Pericles and his friends, and the result of the voting was such that an adequate legal majority condemned Thucydides to ostracism. And it seems that the majority must have been very decisive, for the party of Thucydides was completely broken by it: and we hear of no other single individual equally formidable, as a leader of opposition, throughout all the remaining life of Pericles.

The ostracism of Thucydides apparently took place about two years after the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ Truce (443-442 B.C.), and it is to the period immediately following, that the great Periclean works belong. The southern wall of the Acropolis had been built out of the spoils brought by Cimon from his Persian expeditions; but the third of the Long Walls connecting Athens with the harbour was the proposition of Pericles, at what precise time we do not know. The Long Walls originally completed (not long after the battle of Tanagra, as has already been stated) were two, one from Athens to Piræus, another from Athens to Phalerum: the space between them was broad, and if in the hands of an enemy, the communication with Piræus would be interrupted. Accordingly, Pericles now induced the people to construct a third or intermediate wall, running parallel with the first wall to Piræus, and within a short distance (seemingly near one furlong) from it: so that the communication between the city and the port was placed beyond all possible interruption, even assuming an enemy to have got within the Phaleric wall. It was seemingly about this time, too, that the splendid docks and arsenal in Piræus, alleged by Isocrates to have cost one thousand talents [£200,000 or $1,000,000] were constructed; while the town itself of Piræus was laid out anew with straight streets intersecting at right angles. Apparently this was something new in Greece--the towns generally, and Athens itself in particular, having been built without any symmetry, or width, or continuity of streets: and Hippodamus the Milesian, a man of considerable attainments in the physical philosophy of the age, derived much renown as the earliest town architect, for having laid out the Piræus on a regular plan. The market-place, or one of them at least, permanently bore his name--the Hippodamian agora. At a time when so many great architects were displaying their genius in the construction of temples, we are not surprised to hear that the structure of towns began to be regularised also. Moreover we are told that the new colonial town of Thurii, to which Hippodamus went as a settler, was also constructed in the same systematic form as to straight and wide streets.

The new scheme upon which the Piræus was laid out, was not without its value as one visible proof of the naval grandeur of Athens. But the buildings in Athens and on the Acropolis formed the real glory of the Periclean age. A new theatre, termed the Odeon, was constructed for musical and poetical representations at the great Panathenaic solemnity; next, the splendid temple of Athene, called the Parthenon, with all its masterpieces of decorative sculpture, friezes, and reliefs; lastly, the costly portals erected to adorn the entrance of the Acropolis, on the western side of the hill, through which the solemn processions on festival days were conducted. It appears that the Odeon and the Parthenon were both finished between 445 and 437 B.C.: the Propylæa somewhat later, between 437 and 431 B.C., in which latter year the Peloponnesian War began. Progress was also made in restoring or reconstructing the Erechtheion, or ancient temple of Athene Polias, the patron goddess of the city--which had been burnt in the invasion of Xerxes. But the breaking out of the Peloponnesian War seems to have prevented the completion of this, as well as of the great temple of Demeter, at Eleusis, for the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries--that of Athene, at Sunium--and that of Nemesis at Rhamnus. Nor was the sculpture less memorable than the architecture; three statues of Athene, all by the hand of Phidias, decorated the Acropolis, one colossal, forty-seven feet high, of ivory, in the Parthenon, a second of bronze, called the Lemnian Athene, a third of colossal magnitude, also in bronze, called Athene Promachos, placed between the Propylæa, and the Parthenon, and visible from afar off, even to the navigator approaching Piræus by sea.

It is not, of course, to Pericles that the renown of these splendid productions of art belongs; but the great sculptors and architects, by whom they were conceived and executed, belonged to that same period of expanding and stimulating Athenian democracy, which likewise called forth creative genius in oratory, in dramatic poetry, and in philosophical speculation.

Considering these prodigious achievements in the field of art only as they bear upon Athenian and Grecian history, they are phenomena of extraordinary importance. When we learn the profound impression which they produced upon Grecian spectators of a later age, we may judge how immense was the effect upon that generation which saw them both begun and finished. In the year 480 B.C., Athens was ruined by the occupation of Xerxes: since that period, the Greeks had seen, first, the rebuilding and fortifying of the city on an enlarged scale; next, the addition of Piræus with its docks and magazines; thirdly, the junction of the two by the Long Walls, thus including the most numerous concentrated population, wealth, arms, ships, etc., in Greece; lastly, the rapid creation of so many new miracles of art--the sculptures of Phidias as well as the paintings of the Thasian painter Polygnotus, in the temple of Theseus, and in the portico called Pœcile.[b]

Plutarch says: “That which was the chief delight of the Athenians and the wonder of strangers, and which alone serves for a proof that the boasted power and opulence of ancient Greece is not an idle tale, was the magnificence of the temples and public edifices. Works were raised of an astonishing magnitude, and inimitable beauty and perfection, every architect striving to surpass the magnificence of the design with the elegance of the execution; yet still the most wonderful circumstance was the expedition with which they were completed. Phidias was appointed by Pericles superintendent of all the public edifices.”[f]

It thus appears that the gigantic strides by which Athens had reached her maritime empire were now immediately succeeded by a series of works which stamped her as the imperial city of Greece, gave to her an appearance of power even greater than the reality, and especially put to shame the old-fashioned simplicity of Sparta. The cost was doubtless prodigious, and could only have been borne at a time when there was a large treasure in the Acropolis, as well as a considerable tribute annually coming in: if we may trust a computation which seems to rest on plausible grounds, it cannot have been much less than three thousand talents in the aggregate [£600,000 or $3,000,000].

The expenditure of so large a sum was, of course, a source of revenue and of great private gain to all manner of contractors, tradesmen, merchants, artisans of various descriptions, etc., concerned in it: in one way or another, it distributed itself over a large portion of the whole city. And it appears that the materials employed for much of the work were designedly of the most costly description, as being most consistent with the reverence due to the gods: marble was rejected as too common for the statue of Athene, and ivory employed in its place; while the gold with which it was surrounded weighed not less than forty talents [£8000 or $40,000]. A large expenditure for such purposes, considered as pious towards the gods, was at the same time imposing in reference to Grecian feeling, which regarded with admiration every variety of public show and magnificence, and repaid with grateful deference the rich men who indulged in it. Pericles knew well that the visible splendour of the city, so new to all his contemporaries, would cause her great power to appear greater still, and would thus procure for her a real, though unacknowledged influence--perhaps even an ascendency--over all cities of the Grecian name. And it is certain that even among those who most hated and feared her, at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, there prevailed a powerful sentiment of involuntary deference.

JUDICIAL REFORMS OF PERICLES

Before Ephialtes advanced his main proposition for abridging the competence of the senate of Areopagus, he appears to have been strenuous in repressing the practical abuse of magisterial authority, by accusations brought against the magistrates at the period of their regular accountability. After repeated efforts to check the practical abuse of these magisterial powers, Ephialtes and Pericles were at last conducted to the proposition of cutting them down permanently, and introducing an altered system.

It was now that Pericles and Ephialtes carried their important scheme of judicial reform. The senate of Areopagus was deprived of its discretionary censorial power, as well as of all its judicial competence, except that which related to homicide. The individual magistrates, as well as the senate of Five Hundred, were also stripped of their judicial attributes (except the power of imposing a small fine), which were transferred to the newly created panels of salaried dicasts, lotted off in ten divisions from the aggregate Heliæa. Ephialtes first brought down the laws of Solon from the Acropolis to the neighbourhood of the market-place, where the dicasteries sat--a visible proof that the judicature was now popularised.

In the representation of many authors, the full bearing of this great constitutional change is very inadequately conceived. What we are commonly told is, that Pericles was the first to assign a salary to these numerous dicasteries at Athens. He bribed the people with the public money (says Plutarch), in order to make head against Cimon, who bribed them out of his own private purse; as if the pay were the main feature in the case, and as if all which Pericles did was, to make himself popular by paying the dicasts for judicial service which they had before rendered gratuitously. The truth is, that this numerous army of dicasts, distributed into ten regiments and summoned to act systematically throughout the year, was now for the first time organised: the commencement of their pay is also the commencement of their regular judicial action. What Pericles really did was, to sever for the first time from the administrative competence of the magistrates that judicial authority which had originally gone along with it. The great men who had been accustomed to hold these offices were lowered both in influence and authority: while on the other hand a new life, habit, and sense of power, sprung up among the poorer citizens. A plaintiff having cause of civil action, or an accuser invoking punishment against citizens guilty of injury either to himself or to the state, had still to address himself to one or other of the archons, but it was only with a view of ultimately arriving before the dicastery by whom the cause was to be tried.

While the magistrates individually were thus restricted to simple administration, they experienced still more serious loss of power in their capacity of members of the Areopagus, after the year of archonship was expired. Instead of their previous unmeasured range of supervision and interference, they were now deprived of all judicial sanction beyond that small power of fining which was still left both to individual magistrates, and to the senate of Five Hundred. But the cognisance of homicide was still expressly reserved to them--for the procedure, in this latter case religious not less than judicial, was so thoroughly consecrated by ancient feeling, that no reformer could venture to disturb or remove it.

It was upon this same ground probably that the stationary party defended all the prerogatives of the senate of Areopagus--denouncing the curtailments proposed by Ephialtes as impious and guilty innovations. How extreme their resentment became, when these reforms were carried,--and how fierce was the collision of political parties at this moment,--we may judge by the result. The enemies of Ephialtes caused him to be privately assassinated, by the hand of a Bœotian of Tanagra named Aristodicus. Such a crime--rare in the political annals of Athens, for we come to no known instance of it afterwards until the oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411 B.C.--marks at once the gravity of the change now introduced, the fierceness of the opposition offered, and the unscrupulous character of the conservative party. Cimon was in exile and had no share in the deed. Doubtless the assassination of Ephialtes produced an effect unfavourable in every way to the party who procured it. The popular party in their resentment must have become still more attached to the judicial reforms just assured to them, while the hands of Pericles, the superior leader left behind and now acting singly, must have been materially strengthened.

It is from this point that the administration of that great man may be said to date: he was now the leading adviser (we might almost say Prime Minister) of the Athenian people. His first years were marked by a series of brilliant successes--already mentioned--the acquisition of Megara as an ally, and the victorious war against Corinth and Ægina. But when he proposed the great and valuable improvement of the Long Walls, thus making one city of Athens and Piræus, the same oligarchical party, which had opposed his judicial changes and assassinated Ephialtes, again stood forward in vehement resistance. Finding direct opposition unavailing, they did not scruple to enter into treasonable correspondence with Sparta--invoking the aid of a foreign force for the overthrow of the democracy: so odious had it become in their eyes, since the recent innovations. How serious was the hazard incurred by Athens, near the time of the battle of Tanagra, has been already recounted; together with the rapid and unexpected reconciliation of parties after that battle, principally owing to the generous patriotism of Cimon and his immediate friends. Cimon was restored from ostracism on this occasion, before his full time had expired; while the rivalry between him and Pericles henceforward becomes mitigated, or even converted into a compromise, whereby the internal affairs of the city were left to the one, and the conduct of foreign expeditions to the other. The successes of Athens during the ensuing ten years were more brilliant than ever, and she attained the maximum of her power: which doubtless had a material effect in imparting stability to the democracy as well as to the administration of Pericles--and enabled both the one and the other to stand the shock of those great public reverses, which deprived the Athenians of their dependent landed alliances, in the interval between the defeat of Coronea and the Thirty Years’ Truce.

Along with the important judicial revolution brought about by Pericles, were introduced other changes belonging to the same scheme and system.

Thus a general power of supervision both over the magistrates and over the public assembly, was vested in seven magistrates, now named for the first time, called nomophylaces, or law-guardians, and doubtless changed every year. These nomophylaces sat alongside of the Proedri or presidents both in the senate and in the public assembly, and were charged with the duty of interposing whenever any step was taken or any proposition made contrary to the existing laws: they were also empowered to constrain the magistrates to act according to law.

Another important change, which we may with probability refer to Pericles, is the institution of the nomothetæ. These men were in point of fact dicasts, members of the six thousand citizens annually sworn in that capacity. But they were not, like the dicasts for trying causes, distributed into panels or regiments known by a particular letter and acting together throughout the entire year: they were lotted off to sit together only on special occasion and as the necessity arose. According to the reform now introduced, the ecclesia or public assembly, even with the sanction of the senate of Five Hundred, became incompetent either to pass a new law or to repeal a law already in existence; it could only enact a psephism--that is, properly speaking, a decree applicable only to a particular case; though the word was used at Athens in a very large sense, sometimes comprehending decrees of general as well as permanent application. In reference to laws, a peculiar judicial procedure was established. The thesmothetæ were directed annually to examine the existing laws, noting any contradictions or double laws on the same matter; and in the first prytany (tenth part) of the Attic year, on the eleventh day, an ecclesia was held, in which the first business was to go through the laws seriatim, and submit them for approval or rejection; first beginning with the laws relating to the senate, next coming to those of more general import, especially such as determined the functions and competence of the magistrates. If any law was condemned by the vote of the public assembly, or if any citizen had a new law to propose, the third assembly of the prytany was employed, previous to any other business, in the appointment of nomothetæ and in the provision of means to pay their salary.

The effect of this institution was to place the making or repealing of laws under the same solemnities and guarantees as the trying of causes or accusations in judicature.

As an additional security both to the public assembly and the nomothetæ against being entrapped into decisions contrary to existing law, another remarkable provision has yet to be mentioned--a provision probably introduced by Pericles at the same time as the formalities of law-making by means of specially delegated nomothetæ. This was the Graphe Paranomon--indictment for informality or illegality--which might be brought on certain grounds against the proposer of any law or any psephism, and rendered him liable to punishment by the dicastery. He was required in bringing forward his new measure to take care that it should not be in contradiction with any pre-existing law--or if there were any such contradiction, to give formal notice of it, to propose the repeal of that which existed, and to write up publicly beforehand what his proposition was--in order that there might never be two contradictory laws at the same time in operation, nor any illegal decree passed either by the senate or by the public assembly. If he neglected this precaution, he was liable to prosecution under the Graphe Paranomon, which any Athenian citizen might bring against him before the dicastery, through the intervention and under the presidency of the thesmothetæ.

That this indictment, as one of the most direct vents for such enmity, was largely applied and abused at Athens, is certain. But though it probably deterred unpractised citizens from originating new propositions, it did not produce the same effect upon those orators who made politics a regular business, and who could therefore both calculate the temper of the people, and reckon upon support from a certain knot of friends. Aristophon, towards the close of his political life, made it a boast that he had been thus indicted and acquitted seventy-five times. Probably the worst effect which it produced was that of encouraging the vein of personality and bitterness which pervades so large a proportion of Attic oratory, even in its most illustrious manifestations; turning deliberative into judicial eloquence, and interweaving the discussion of a law or decree along with a declamatory harangue against the character of its mover. We may at the same time add that the Graphe Paranomon was often the most convenient way of getting a law or a psephism repealed, so that it was used even when the annual period had passed over, and when the mover was therefore out of danger, the indictment being then brought only against the law or decree.

Such were the great constitutional innovations of Pericles and Ephialtes,--changes full of practical results,--the transformation, as well as the complement, of that democratical system which Clisthenes had begun and to which the tide of Athenian feeling had been gradually mounting up during the preceding twenty years. The entire force of these changes is generally not perceived, because the popular dicasteries and the nomothetæ are so often represented as institutions of Solon, and as merely supplied with pay by Pericles. This erroneous supposition prevents all clear view of the growth of the Athenian democracy by throwing back its last elaborations to the period of its early and imperfect start. To strip the magistrates of all their judicial power, except that of imposing a small fine, and the Areopagus of all its jurisdiction except in cases of homicide--providing popular, numerous, and salaried dicasts to decide all the judicial business at Athens as well as to repeal and enact laws--this was the consummation of the Athenian democracy. No serious constitutional alteration (excepting the temporary interruptions of the Four Hundred and the Thirty) was afterwards made until the days of Macedonian interference. As Pericles made it, so it remained in the days of Demosthenes--though with a sensible change in the character, and abatement in the energies, of the people, rich as well as poor.

In appreciating the practical working of these numerous dicasteries at Athens, in comparison with such justice as might have been expected from individual magistrates, we have to consider: first, that personal and pecuniary corruption seems to have been a common vice among the leading men of Athens and Sparta, when acting individually or in boards of a few members, and not uncommon even with the kings of Sparta; next, that in the Grecian cities generally, as we know even from the oligarchical Xenophon (he particularly excepts Sparta), the rich and great men were not only insubordinate to the magistrates, but made a parade of showing that they cared nothing about them. We know also from the same unsuspected source, that while the poorer Athenian citizens who served on shipboard were distinguished for the strictest discipline, the hoplites or middling burghers who formed the infantry were less obedient, and the rich citizens who served on horseback the most disobedient of all.

To make rich criminals amenable to justice has been found so difficult everywhere, until a recent period of history, that we should be surprised if it were otherwise in Greece. When we follow the reckless demeanour of rich men like Critias, Alcibiades, and Midias, even under the full-grown democracy of Athens, we may be sure that their predecessors under the Clisthenean constitution would have been often too formidable to be punished or kept down by an individual archon of ordinary firmness, even assuming him to be upright and well-intentioned. Now the dicasteries established by Pericles were inaccessible both to corruption and intimidation: their number, their secret suffrage, and the impossibility of knowing beforehand what individuals would sit in any particular cause, prevented both the one and the other. And besides that the magnitude of their number, extravagant according to our ideas of judicial business, was essential to this tutelary effect--it served further to render the trial solemn and the verdict imposing on the minds of parties and spectators, as we may see by the fact that, in important causes the dicastery was doubled or tripled. Nor was it possible by any other means than numbers to give dignity to an assembly of citizens, of whom many were poor, some old, and all were despised individually by rich accused persons who were brought before them--as Aristophanes and Xenophon give us plainly to understand. If we except the strict and peculiar educational discipline of Sparta, these numerous dicasteries afforded the only organ which Grecian politics could devise, for getting redress against powerful criminals, public as well as private, and for obtaining a sincere and uncorrupt verdict.

Taking the general working of the dicasteries, we shall find that they are nothing but jury-trial applied on a scale broad, systematic, unaided, and uncontrolled, beyond all other historical experience--and that they therefore exhibit in exaggerated proportions both the excellences and the defects characteristic of the jury system, as compared with decision by trained and professional judges. All the encomiums, which it is customary to pronounce upon jury-trial, will be found predicable of the Athenian dicasteries in a still greater degree; all the reproaches, which can be addressed on good ground to the dicasteries, will apply to modern juries also, though in a less degree.

RHETORS AND SOPHISTS

The first establishment of the dicasteries is nearly coincident with the great improvement of Attic tragedy in passing from Æschylus to Sophocles. The same development of the national genius, now preparing splendid manifestations both in tragic and comic poetry, was called with redoubled force into the path of oratory, by the new judicial system. A certain power of speech now became necessary, not merely for those who intended to take a prominent part in politics, but also for private citizens to vindicate their rights or repel accusations, in a court of justice. It was an accomplishment of the greatest practical utility, even apart from ambitious purposes; hardly less so than the use of arms or the practice of the gymnasium. Accordingly, the teachers of grammar and rhetoric, and the composers of written speeches to be delivered by others, now began to multiply and to acquire an unprecedented importance--as well at Athens as under the contemporary democracy of Syracuse, in which also some form of popular judicature was established. Style and speech began to be reduced to a system, and so communicated; not always happily, for several of the early rhetors adopted an artificial, ornate, and conceited manner, from which Attic good taste afterwards liberated itself. But the very character of a teacher of rhetoric as an art--a man giving precepts and putting himself forward in show-lectures as a model for others, is a feature first belonging to the Periclean age, and indicates a new demand in the minds of the citizens.

We begin to hear, in the generation now growing up, of the rhetor and the sophist, as persons of influence and celebrity. These two names denoted persons of similar moral and intellectual endowments, or often indeed the same person, considered in different points of view; either as professing to improve the moral character, or as communicating power and facility of expression, or as suggesting premises for persuasion, illustrations on the commonplaces of morals and politics, argumentative abundance on matters of ordinary experience, dialectical subtlety in confuting an opponent, etc. Antiphon of the deme Rhamnus in Attica, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, Tisias of Syracuse, Gorgias of Leontini, Protagoras of Abdera, Prodicus of Ceos, Theodorus of Byzantium, Hippias of Elis, Zeno of Elea, were among the first who distinguished themselves in these departments of teaching. Antiphon was the author of the earliest composed speech really spoken in a dicastery and preserved down to the later critics. These men were mostly not citizens of Athens, though many of them belonged to towns comprehended in the Athenian empire, at a time when important judicial causes belonging to these towns were often carried up to be tried at Athens--while all of them looked to that city as a central point of action and distinction. The term “sophist,” which Herodotus applies with sincere respect to men of distinguished wisdom such as Solon, Anacharsis, Pythagoras, etc., now came to be applied to these teachers of virtue, rhetoric, conversation, and disputation; many of whom professed acquaintance with the whole circle of human science, physical as well as moral (then narrow enough), so far as was necessary to talk about any portion of it plausibly, and to answer any question proposed to them.

Though they passed from one town to another, partly in the capacity of envoys from their fellow-citizens, partly as exhibiting their talents to numerous hearers, with much renown and large gain--they appear to have been viewed with jealousy and dislike by a large portion of the public. For at a time when every citizen pleaded his own cause before the dicastery, they imparted, to those who were rich enough to purchase it, a peculiar skill in the common weapons, which made them like fencing-masters or professional swordsmen amidst a society of untrained duellists. Moreover Socrates--himself a product of the same age, a disputant on the same subjects, and bearing the same name of a sophist--but despising political and judicial practice, and looking to the production of intellectual stimulus and moral impressions upon his hearers--Socrates or rather Plato, speaking through the person of Socrates--carried on throughout his life a constant polemical warfare against the sophists and rhetors in that negative vein in which he was unrivalled. And as the works of these latter have not remained, it is chiefly from the observations of their opponents that we know them; so that they are in a situation such as that in which Socrates himself would have been if we had been compelled to judge of him only from the Clouds of Aristophanes, or from those unfavourable impressions respecting his character which we know, even from the Apologia of Plato and Xenophon, to have been generally prevalent at Athens.

This is not the opportunity, however, for trying to distinguish the good from the evil in the working of the sophists and rhetors. At present it is enough that they were the natural product of the age; supplying those wants, and answering to that stimulus, which arose partly from the deliberations of the ecclesia, but still more from the contentions before the dicastery--in which latter a far greater number of citizens took active part, with or without their own consent. The public and frequent dicasteries constituted by Pericles opened to the Athenian mind precisely that career of improvement which was best suited to its natural aptitude. They were essential to the development of that demand out of which grew not only Grecian oratory, but also, as secondary products, the speculative moral and political philosophy, and the didactic analysis of rhetoric and grammar, which long survived after Grecian creative genius had passed away. And it was one of the first measures of the oligarchy of Thirty, to forbid by an express law, any teaching of the art of speaking. Aristophanes derides the Athenians for their love of talk and controversy, as if it had enfeebled their military energy; but in his time, most undoubtedly, that reproach was not true--nor did it become true, even in part, until the crushing misfortunes which marked the close of the Peloponnesian War. During the course of that war, restless and energetic action was the characteristic of Athens even in a greater degree than oratory or political discussion, though before the time of Demosthenes a material alteration had taken place.

The establishment of these paid dicasteries at Athens was thus one of the most important and prolific events in all Grecian history. The pay helped to furnish a maintenance for old citizens, past the age of military service. Elderly men were the best persons for such a service, and were preferred for judicial purposes both at Sparta and, as it seems, in heroic Greece. Nevertheless, we need not suppose that all the dicasts were either old or poor, though a considerable proportion of them were so, and though Aristophanes selects these qualities as among the most suitable subjects for his ridicule. Pericles has been often censured for this institution, as if he had been the first to insure pay to dicasts who before served for nothing, and had thus introduced poor citizens into courts previously composed of citizens above poverty. But in the first place, this supposition is not correct in point of fact, inasmuch as there were no such constant dicasteries previously acting without pay; next, if it had been true, the habitual exclusion of the poor citizens would have nullified the popular working of these bodies, and would have prevented them from answering any longer to the reigning sentiment at Athens. Nor could it be deemed unreasonable to assign a regular pay to those who thus rendered regular service. It was indeed an essential item in the whole scheme and purpose, so that the suppression of the pay of itself seems to have suspended the dicasteries, while the oligarchy of Four Hundred was established--and it can only be discussed in that light. As the fact stands, we may suppose that the six thousand heliasts who filled the dicasteries were composed of the middling and poorer citizens indiscriminately; though there was nothing to exclude the richer, if they chose to serve.[b]

PHIDIAS ACCUSED

The public works which were undertaken through the advice of Pericles were executed under his inspection; the choice of the artists employed and of the plans adopted, was probably entrusted in a great measure to his judgment; and the large sums expended on them passed through his hands. This was an office which it was scarcely possible to exercise at Athens without either exciting suspicion or giving a handle for calumny. We find that Cratinus in one of his comedies threw out some hints as to the tardiness with which Pericles carried on the third of the Long Walls which he had persuaded the people to begin. “He had been long professing to go on with it, but in fact did not stir a step.” Whether the motives to which this delay was imputed were such as to call his integrity into question, does not appear; but in time his enemies ventured openly to attack him on this ground. Yet the first blow was not aimed directly at himself, but was intended to wound him through the side of a friend. Phidias, whose genius was the ruling principle which animated and controlled every design for the ornament of the city, had been brought, as well by conformity of taste as by the nature of his engagement, into an intimate relation with Pericles. To ruin Phidias was one of the readiest means both of hurting the feelings and of shaking the credit of Pericles. If Phidias could be convicted of a fraud on the public, it would seem an unavoidable inference that Pericles had shared the profit. The ivory statue of the goddess in the Parthenon, which was enriched with massy ornaments of pure gold, appeared to offer a groundwork for a charge which could not easily be refuted. To give it the greater weight, a man named Menon, who had been employed by Phidias in some of the details of the work, was induced to seat himself in the agora with the ensigns of a suppliant, and to implore pardon of the people as the condition of revealing an offence in which he had been an accomplice with Phidias. He accused Phidias of having embezzled a part of the gold which he had received from the treasury. But this charge immediately fell to the ground through a contrivance which Pericles had adopted for a different end. The golden ornaments had been fixed on the statue in such a manner, that they could be taken off without doing it any injury, and thus afforded the means of ascertaining their exact weight. Pericles challenged the accusers of Phidias to use this opportunity of verifying their charge; but they shrank from the application of this decisive test.

Though however they were thus baffled in this part of their attempt, they were not abashed or deterred; for they had discovered another ground, which gave them a surer hold on the public mind. Some keen eye had observed two figures among those with which Phidias had represented the battle between Theseus and the Amazons on the shield of the goddess, in which it detected the portraits of the artist himself, as a bald old man, and that of Pericles in all the comeliness of his graceful person. To the religious feelings of the Athenians this mode of perpetuating the memory of individuals, by connecting their portraits with an object of public worship, appeared to violate the sanctity of the place; and it was probably also viewed as an arrogant intrusion, no less offensive to the majesty of the commonwealth. It seems as if Menon’s evidence was required even to support this charge. Phidias was committed to prison, and died there. The informer, who was a foreigner, was rewarded with certain immunities; and, as one who in the service of the state had provoked a powerful enemy, was placed by a formal decree under the protection of the Ten Generals.

ASPASIA AT THE BAR

This success emboldened the enemies of Pericles to proceed. They had not indeed established any of their accusations; but they had sounded the disposition of the people, and found that it might be inspired with distrust and jealousy of its powerful minister, or that it was not unwilling to see him humbled. They seem now to have concerted a plan for attacking him, both directly and indirectly, in several quarters at once; and they began with a person in whose safety he felt as much concern as in his own, and who could not be ruined without involving him in the like calamity.

This was the celebrated Aspasia, who had long attracted almost as much of the public attention at Athens as Pericles himself. She was a native of Miletus, which was early and long renowned as a school for the cultivation of female graces. She had come, it would seem, as an adventurer to Athens, and by the combined charms of her person, manners, and conversation, won the affections and the esteem of Pericles. Her station had freed her from the restraints which custom laid on the education of the Athenian matron: and she had enriched her mind with accomplishments which were rare even among the men. Her acquaintance with Pericles seems to have begun while he was still united to a lady of high birth, before the wife of the wealthy Hipponicus. We can hardly doubt that it was Aspasia who first disturbed this union, though it is said to have been dissolved by mutual consent. But after parting from his wife, who had borne him two sons, Pericles attached himself to Aspasia by the most intimate relation which the laws permitted him to contract with a foreign woman; and she acquired an ascendency over him, which soon became notorious, and furnished the comic poets with an inexhaustible fund of ridicule, and his enemies with a ground for serious charges. On the stage she was the Hera of the Athenian Zeus, the Omphale, or the Dejanira of an enslaved or a faithless Hercules. The Samian War was ascribed to her interposition on behalf of her birthplace; and rumours were set afloat which represented her as ministering to the vices of Pericles by the most odious and degrading of offices. There was perhaps as little foundation for this report, as for a similar one in which Phidias was implicated; though among all the imputations brought against Pericles this is that which it is the most difficult clearly to refute.

But we are inclined to believe that it may have arisen from the peculiar nature of Aspasia’s private circles, which, with a bold neglect of established usage, were composed not only of the most intelligent and accomplished men to be found at Athens, but also of matrons, who it is said were brought by their husbands, to listen to her conversation; which must have been highly instructive as well as brilliant, since Plato did not hesitate to describe her as the preceptress of Socrates, and to assert that she both formed the rhetoric of Pericles, and composed one of his most admired harangues. The innovation which drew women of free birth, and good condition, into her company for such a purpose, must, even where the truth was understood, have surprised and offended many; and it was liable to the grossest misconstruction. And if her female friends were sometimes seen watching the progress of the works of Phidias, it was easy, through his intimacy with Pericles, to connect this fact with a calumny of the same kind.

There was another rumour still more dangerous, which grew out of the character of the persons who were admitted to the society of Pericles and Aspasia. Athens had become a place of resort for learned and ingenious men of all pursuits. None were more welcome at the house of Pericles than such as were distinguished by philosophical studies, and especially by the profession of new speculative tenets. He himself was never weary of discussing such subjects; and Aspasia was undoubtedly able to bear her part in this, as well as in any other kind of conversation. The mere presence of Anaxagoras, Zeno, Protagoras, and other celebrated men, who were known to hold doctrines very remote from the religious conceptions of the vulgar, was sufficient to make a circle in which they were familiar pass for a school of impiety. Such were the materials out of which the comic poet Hermippus, laying aside the mask, framed a criminal prosecution against Aspasia. His indictment included two heads: an offence against religion, and that of corrupting Athenian women to gratify the passions of Pericles.

ANAXAGORAS ALSO ASSAILED

This cause seems to have been still pending, when one Diopithes procured a decree, by which persons who denied the being of the gods, or taught doctrines concerning the celestial bodies which were inconsistent with religion, were made liable to a certain criminal process. This stroke was aimed immediately at Anaxagoras--whose physical speculations had become famous, and were thought to rob the greatest of the heavenly beings of their inherent deity--but indirectly at his disciple and patron Pericles. When the discussion of this decree, and the prosecution commenced against Aspasia, had disposed the people to listen to other less probable charges, the main attack was opened, and the accusation which in the affair of Phidias had been silenced by the force of truth, was revived in another form. A decree was passed on the motion of one Dracontides, directing Pericles to give in his accounts to the Prytanis, to be submitted to a trial, which was to be conducted with extraordinary solemnity; for it was to be held in the citadel, and the jurors were to take the balls with which each signified his verdict, from the top of an altar. But this part of the decree was afterwards modified by an amendment moved by Agnon, which ordered the cause to be tried in the ordinary way, but by a body of fifteen hundred jurors. The uncertainty of the party which managed these proceedings, and their distrust as to the evidence which they should be able to procure, seem to be strongly marked by a clause in this decree, which provided that the offence imputed to Pericles might be described either as embezzlement, or by a more general name, as coming under the head of public wrong.

Yet all these machinations failed at least of reaching their main object. The issue of those which were directed against Anaxagoras cannot be exactly ascertained through the discrepancy of the accounts given of it. According to some authors he was tried, and condemned either to a fine and banishment or to death; but in the latter case made his escape from prison. According to others he was defended by Pericles, and acquitted. Plutarch says that Pericles, fearing the event of a trial, induced him to withdraw from Athens; and it seems to have been admitted on all hands, that he ended his long life in quiet and honour at Lampsacus. The danger which threatened Aspasia was also averted; but it seems that Pericles, who pleaded her cause, found need for his most strenuous exertions, and that in her behalf he descended to tears and entreaties, which no similar emergency of his own could ever draw from him. It was indeed probably a trial more of his personal influence than of his eloquence; and his success, hardly as it was won, may have induced his adversaries to drop the proceedings instituted against himself, or at least to postpone them to a fitter season. After weathering this storm he seems to have recovered his former high and firm position, which to the end of his life was never again endangered, except by one very transient gust of popular displeasure. He felt strong enough to resist the wishes, and to rebuke the impatience of the people. Yet it was a persuasion so widely spread among the ancients as to have lasted even to modern times, that his dread of the persecution which hung over him, and his consciousness that his expenditure of the public money would not bear a scrutiny, were at least among the motives which induced him to kindle the war which put an end to the Thirty Years’ Truce.[c]

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XXVII. MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE AGE OF PERICLES

Hail, Nature’s utmost boast! unrivalled Greece! My fairest reign! where every power benign Conspired to blow the flower of human kind, And lavished all that genius can inspire.

--JAMES THOMSON.

COST OF LIVING AND WAGES

[Sidenote: [460-410 B.C.]]

Everywhere in the ancient world, but in a higher or less degree in different countries, the necessaries of life upon the whole were cheaper than they are at the present day. But with regard to particular articles, examples enough of the contrary are found. The main causes of this comparative cheapness were the less amount of money in circulation, the uncommon fruitfulness of the southern countries which the Greeks inhabited, or with which they traded; countries which at that time were cultivated with an extraordinary degree of care, but are at present neglected; and the impossibility of exportation to the distant regions which had no intercourse, or but little, with the countries lying on the Mediterranean Sea. The last is especially the reason of the great cheapness of wine. The large quantities of the same which were produced in all southern regions, were not distributed over so considerable an extent of the earth as at present. Nevertheless in considering the prices of commodities in ancient times the difference of times and places must be well weighed. In Rome and Athens wine was not, in the most flourishing condition of the state, as cheap as it was in Upper Italy and in Lusitania. In Upper Italy, the Sicilian medimnus of wheat, which was equal to the Attic medimnus, and considerably less than the Prussian bushel (or than 1½ English bushels), was worth, even in the times of Polybius, according to the account of that historian, only four oboli. This price seems to rest upon an inaccurate comparison of the Roman with the Greek coin, and particularly upon the supposition that the modius, one-sixth of the medimnus, was worth two asses, the medimnus, therefore, worth twelve asses; which, estimating the denarius to be equivalent to the drachma, would be equal to 4½ oboli. To this last amount four ancient oboli of the standard of Solon (11.4 cents) may certainly be estimated as equivalent. The medimnus of barley was worth the half of this price, the metretes of wine (about ten English gallons), was worth as much as the medimnus of barley.

In the time of Solon, indeed, an ox was worth only five drachmæ, a sheep one drachma, and the medimnus of grain the same. But gradually the prices increased five fold; of several articles seven, ten and twenty fold. After the examples of modern times this will not appear strange. The amount of ready money was not only increased, but by the increase of population, and of intercourse, its circulation was accelerated: so that already in the age of Socrates, Athens was considered an expensive place of residence.

The cheapness of commodities, in ancient times, has generally been exaggerated by some, who supposed the assumption, that prices were on an average ten times lower than in the eighteenth century, to come the nearest to the truth. The prices of grain, according to which the prices of many other articles must be regulated, show the contrary. It is difficult to designate average prices, however; since so few, and those only very casual accounts, are extant. Letronne designates the value of the medimnus of grain at two and a half drachmæ as the average price in Greece, in particular at the city of Athens, about the year 400 B.C.; and in accordance with this, he assumes the value of grain, compared with that of silver, to have been in the relation of 1 to 3146; the same at Rome, fifty years before the Christian era, to have been in the relation of 1 to 2681, in France, before the year 1520 in the relation of 1 to 4320, and in the nineteenth century in the relation of 1 to 1050. This estimation, according to which the present prices of grain are three times as high as they were during the period of the most flourishing condition of Greece, appears the most probable.

The most temperate man needed daily, at least, an obolus for his food, one-fourth of an obolus for a chœnix of grain, according to the price of barley in the time of Socrates; together, annually, reckoning the year at 360 days, 75 drachmæ; for clothes and shoes at least 15 drachmæ. A family, therefore, of four adult persons must have needed at least 360 drachmæ (£12 or $60) for these necessaries of life. The sum requisite, however, in the time of Demosthenes, must have been 22½ drachmæ higher for each person; for 4 persons, therefore, 90 drachmæ (£3 or $15) higher. To this must be added the cost of a habitation, the value of which, estimated at least at 3 minæ, would involve, according to the common rate of interest (12 per cent.), an annual expense of 36 drachmæ (£1 or $5). So that the poorest family of 4 adult free persons, if they did not wish to live upon bread and water, needed upon an average about £17 or $85 annually.

Socrates did not have, as was falsely reported, two wives at the same time, but one after the other; Myrto, who was poor when he married her, and who probably had no dowry, and Xanthippe. He also had three children. Of these, Lamprocles was already adult at the death of his father, but Sophroniscus and Menexenus were minors. He prosecuted no manual art after he had sacrificed the employment of his youth to the never-resting effort to acquire wisdom. His teaching procured him no income. According to Xenophon he lived upon his property, which, if it should have found a good purchaser (ὡνητὴς), the house included, might easily have brought, altogether, five minæ; and he needed only a small addition from his friends. From this it has been inferred, that living was extraordinarily cheap at Athens. It is evident, however, that Socrates with his family could not live upon the interest of so small an amount of property. For, however poor the house may have been, its value can scarcely be estimated at less than three minæ. So that, without taking the furniture into consideration, the remainder of his property from which interest could be derived, could have amounted to but two minæ, and the income from it, according to the common rate of interest, to only twenty-four drachmæ. With this sum he could not have procured even the amount of barley which was requisite for himself and his wife, to say nothing of the other necessaries of life, and of the support of his children.

The history of the ancient sages is so entangled and garnished with traditions, and the circumstances of their lives are so differently represented even by contemporary writers, that we can seldom find firm ground on which to stand. Thus, according to the defence of Socrates composed by Plato, the former is represented to have affirmed that he could pay for his liberation only about a mina of silver; and Eubulides says the same. According to others, he estimated the amount which he should pay at twenty-five drachmæ, and in the defence ascribed to Xenophon he is represented as neither having himself estimated any amount, nor having allowed his friends to do so. Thus the well-informed Demetrius of Phalerum affirmed, in opposition to Xenophon, that Socrates had, beside his house, seventy minæ at interest in the possession of Crito. And Libanius informs us that he had lost eighty minæ, which he had inherited from his father, by the insolvency of a friend, in whose hands he had placed it, and who certainly cannot have been, as Schneider supposed, the wealthy Crito.

But assuming that Xenophon’s account is perfectly correct, we must suppose that the mother of the young boys supported herself and both the children, either by labour or from her dowry, and that Lamprocles supported himself, and that the famed economy of Socrates probably consisted, among other things, in this also, that he kept them at work. And then, again, suppose that he always lived upon his twenty-four drachmæ, with a small additional sum from his friends, yet no one could live as he did. It is true, that he is said to have frequently offered sacrifices at home, and upon the public altars. But they were doubtless only baked dough, shaped into the forms of animals, after the manner of the poor; properly bread, therefore, a great part of which was at the same time eaten, and to which his family also contributed. He lived in the strictest sense upon bread and water, except when invited to entertainments at the tables of others, and could therefore be particularly glad, as he is said to have been, on account of the cheapness of barley, when four chœnices sold for an obolus. He wore no undergarment; even his outside garment was poor, and the same one was worn both summer and winter. He generally went barefooted, and his dress-sandals, which he occasionally wore, may have lasted him his life-time. His walk for pleasure and exercise before his house served him instead of a relish for his meal. In short, no slave was so poorly maintained as was Socrates. The drachma [about 8½d. or 17 cents] which he gave Prodicus was certainly the largest sum ever spent by him at one time. And it may boldly be affirmed, without wishing to disparage his exalted genius, that, in respect to his indigence, and a certain cynicism in his character, the representation of Aristophanes was not much exaggerated, but in the essential particulars was delineated from the life.

If in the time of Socrates four persons lived upon £17 or $85 a year, they must have been satisfied with but a scanty allowance. He who wished to live respectably, needed even then, and still more in the time of Demosthenes, a sum considerably larger. According to the speech against Phænippus, there were left to the complainant and his brother by their father, forty-five minæ to each, on which, it is said, one could not easily live, namely, upon the interest of it, which amounted, according to the common rate of interest, to 540 drachmæ (£19 or $95).

Mantitheus in Demosthenes asserts that he could have been maintained and educated upon the interest of his mother’s dowry, which amounted to a talent; consequently, according to the usual rate of interest, upon 720 drachmæ (£25 or $125), annually. For the maintenance of the young Demosthenes himself, his sister still younger, and his mother, seven minæ (£24 or $120) were annually paid, without reckoning anything for their habitation, since they dwelt in their own house. The cost of the education of Demosthenes was not included in this sum. For that the guardians remained in debt. Lysias refers, in one of his speeches, to the knavish account of the guardian of the children of Diodotus. He had, for example, charged for clothing, shoes, and hair-cutting over a talent for a period of less than eight years, and for sacrifices and festivals more than four thousand drachmæ, and he ultimately would pay a balance of only two minæ of silver, and thirty Cyzicene staters, whereby his wards had become impoverished. Lysias remarks, that if he had charged more than any one in the city had ever done before for two boys, and their sister, a pedagogue, and a female servant, his account could not have amounted to more than a thousand drachmæ (£35 or $175) annually. This would be not much less than three drachmæ daily, and must certainly appear to have been too much in the time of that orator for three children and two attendants.

In the time of Solon one must certainly have been able to travel quite a distance with an obolus, since that lawgiver forbid that a woman should take with her upon a march, or a journey, a larger quantity of meat and drink than could be purchased for that sum, and a basket of larger dimensions than an ell in length. On the contrary, when the citizens of Trœzen, according to Plutarch, resolved to give to each of the old men, women, and children who fled from Athens upon the approach of Xerxes, two oboli daily, it appears to be a large sum for the purpose. In the most flourishing period of the state, however, even a single person could maintain himself but indifferently on two or three oboli a day. Notwithstanding all this, the cheapness and facility of living still remained very great. In accordance with the noble reverence of the Greeks for the dead, the death of a man, his interment, and monument, often occasioned more expense than many years of his life, since private persons appropriated three, ten, fifty, and even 120 minæ, to that purpose.

The value of the property of the Athenian people, excluding the property of the state, and the mines, was according to a probable computation, at thirty thousand to forty thousand talents. Of these if only twenty thousand talents be considered productive property, every one of the twenty thousand citizens would have had, if the property had been equally divided, the interest of a talent, or, according to the common rate of interest, 720 drachmæ as an annual income. On this, with the addition of the profit from their labour, they might all have lived in a respectable manner. They would in that case have realised what the ancient sages and statesmen considered the highest prosperity of a state. But a considerable number of the citizens were poor. Others possessed a large amount of property, on which they could fare luxuriously on account of the cheapness of living, and the high rate of interest, and yet at the same time could increase their means, because property augmented exceedingly fast.

This inequality corrupted the state, and the manners of the people. Its most natural consequence was the submissiveness of the poor towards the rich, although they believed that their rights were equal. The rich followed the practice, afterwards so notorious and decried at Rome, of suing for the favour of the people, sometimes in a nobler, sometimes in a baser manner.

In proportion to the cheapness of the necessaries of life, the wages of labour must have been less in ancient times than at present. And all the multitude of those who sought labour as the means of subsistence must have diminished its price, since competition everywhere produces this result. In this number, beside the thetes and aliens under the protection of the state, a great part of the slaves are to be included; so that the families of slaves belonging to the rich, lessened the profit of the poorer class of citizens. The Phocians, by whom the keeping of slaves is said to have been in the earlier periods of their state prohibited, not unjustly reproached Mnason, who possessed a thousand slaves and more, for depriving an equal number of poor citizens of the means of subsistence. After the Peloponnesian War even citizens who had been accustomed to a higher standing were compelled to support themselves, whatever it might have cost them to submit to it, as day labourers, or in some other way, by the labour of their hands. For they had lost their landed property in foreign states, and on account of the want of money, and the decrease of the population, rents had depreciated, and loans were not to be had.

Nevertheless, we do not find that daily wages were excessively low. Lucian represents the daily wages of an agricultural labourer or gardener, on a remote estate lying near the frontiers of Attica, to have been, in the time of Timon, four oboli (5¾d. or 11.4 cents). The wages of a porter are the same in Aristophanes, and of a common labourer, who carried dirt, they were three oboli. When Ptolemy sent to the Rhodians one hundred house builders, together with 350 labourers, in order to restore the buildings destroyed by an earthquake, he gave them fourteen talents annually for their food, three oboli a day for each man. We know not, however, by what standard the money was estimated. This was, if they were slaves, for other aliment beside grain; if they were free men, it was only a part of their wages, since a man needs something else besides his food. In 408 B.C., a sawyer (πρίστης) who sawed for a public building, received a drachma a day. A carpenter, who worked on the same building, received five oboli a day. We find that in the time of Pericles, as it seems, a drachma, as daily wages, was given to each of a number of persons working by the day. It is not at all probable that they were artisans, but only common labourers.

Persons in higher stations, or those who laboured with the pen, were, according to genuine democratic principles, not better paid. The architect of the temple of Minerva Polias received no more than a stone sawyer, or common labourer engaged upon the building, namely, a drachma (8½d. or 17 cents) daily. The undersecretary (ὑπογραμματεὺς) of the superintendents of the public buildings received daily five oboli (7¼d. or 14.25 cents). For particular services, in which a certain deference is manifested by the labourer to the person served, a high price was paid in Athens, as is the case in all large cities. When Bacchus in the Frogs of Aristophanes wishes to have his bundle carried by a porter, the latter demands two drachmæ. When the god offers the ghost nine oboli, he replies that before he will do so, he must become alive again. If this conversation in the realm of departed spirits is not a scene from real life, it has no point. A living porter at Athens was probably just as shameless in his demands, and if less were offered, he might have said: “I must die before I do it.”

The fare for a voyage by sea, particularly for long voyages, was extraordinarily low. For sailing from Ægina to the Piræus, more than sixteen miles, two oboli (3d. or 6 cents) were paid in the time of Plato. For sailing from Egypt, or Pontus, to the Piræus, a man, with his family and baggage, paid in the same period at the most two drachmæ (1s. 5d. or 35 cents). This is a proof that commerce was very lucrative, so that it was not found necessary to take a high fare from passengers. In the time of Lucian four oboli were given for being conveyed from Athens to Ægina. The freight of timber seems to have been higher, according to Demosthenes, who mentions that for transporting a ship-load from Macedonia to Athens, 1,750 drachmæ were paid. The enormous vessel for conveying grain named Isis, which in the time of the emperors brought so much grain from Egypt to Italy, that, according to report, the cargo was sufficient to last the whole of Attica a year, earned in freight at least twelve talents annually. The freight of a talent in weight from Ceos, which lay directly opposite Sunium, to Athens, was an obolus.

The price of a bath, although it is not barely a compensation for labour was two oboli. A delicate little gentleman is represented by Philemon to have paid four persons each six chalci, as appears from a passage of Pollux, for plucking out the hair of his body with pitch, that he might have a feminine skin. Moreover, the rich had their own, and the Athenian people public baths.

The pay of the soldiers was different in different periods, and according to circumstances. It fluctuated between two oboli, and, including the money given for subsistence, two drachmæ for a hoplite and his servant. The cavalry received from twice to fourfold the pay of the infantry; officers, commonly twice, generals four fold the same. For, as in respect to labour performed for daily wages, the higher station had not a relatively higher estimation in the same degree, as at the present day. The money given for subsistence was commonly equal in amount to the pay. For from two to three oboli a day the soldier could maintain himself quite well, especially since in many places living was much cheaper than in Athens. His pay was partly as surplus, partly for clothes and weapons, and if booty were added, he might become rich. This explains the saying of the comedian Theopompus, that a man could support a wife on two oboli of pay daily; with four oboli a day his fortune was made. The pay alone of the soldier is here meant, without the money given him for subsistence.

The pay of the judges, and of those who attended the assemblies of the people (ἐκκλησιασταί) amounted at least to three oboli a day, and like the theoricon served only as an additional supply for the subsistence of the citizens. The heliast in Aristophanes shows clearly how difficult it was, with that sum, to procure bread, food, and wood for three persons. He does not include clothing and habitation, because he sustained the expenses for them out of his own property. The pay of senators and of ambassadors was higher. Persons engaged in the liberal arts and sciences, and prostitutes, were paid the highest prices.

The ancient states maintained public, salaried physicians; for example, Hippocrates is said to have been public physician at Athens. These, again, had servants, particularly slaves, who attended to their masters’ business among the poorer class, and among the slaves. The celebrated physician Democedes, of Croton, received, about 540 B.C. notwithstanding there was little money in circulation at that time, the high salary of a talent of silver (£211:10 or $1026, since Attic money seems to be meant). When called to Athens he received one hundred minæ (£350 or $1750), until Polycrates of Samos gave him two talents. In like manner, no doubt, practitioners in many other arts were paid by the state; as, for example, architects at Rhodes and Cyzicus, and certainly in every place of importance. For it cannot be supposed that all architects, particularly those invited from foreign countries, would have exercised their art, as several did at Athens, for daily wages.

The compensation of musicians, and of theatrical performers, was very high. Amœbeus, a singer of ancient Athens, received every time he sang in public, an Attic talent. That the players on the flute demanded a high price for their services, is well known. In a Corcyræan inscription, a late one indeed, but executed before the dominion of the Romans was established in that island, fifty Corinthian minæ were designated as the compensation, beside their expensive maintenance, for the services of three players on the flute, three tragedians, and three comedians at the celebration of a festival. The compensation of distinguished theatrical performers was not less, although, beside the period of their engagement at Athens, they earned large sums in travelling, and performing at the various cities and places on their route. For example, Polus or Aristodemus is said to have earned a talent in two days, or even in one day, or for performing in a single drama. All these artists received, in addition, prizes of victory. Also common itinerant theatrical performers, jugglers, conjurers, fortune-tellers, enjoyed a competency; although the sum paid by the individual spectator was small, a few chalci, or oboli, but sometimes even a drachma. The custom of paying fees for apprenticeship to the trades and arts, and also to the medical profession, was established even in the time of Socrates. For a part of the instruction in music, and for athletic exercises, it was the duty of the tribes in Athens to provide. Each tribe had its own teachers, whose lessons the youth of the whole tribe attended. In the other schools each individual paid for his instruction; we know not how much. The legislation of Charondas, in which the salaries of the teachers are said to have been permanently established, would have made an exception, if the laws from which Diodorus derived his information, had not been fictitious.

The teachers of wisdom and eloquence, or sophists, were not paid by the state until later times. But in earlier periods, they required large sums from their scholars. In this they imitated the mercenary lyric poets, whose inspiration frequently slumbered until incited by gold. Protagoras of Abdera is said to have been the first who taught for money. He required from each scholar, for a complete course of instruction, an hundred minæ (£350 or $1750). Gorgias asked the same price, and yet his property at his death amounted to only one thousand staters. Zeno of Elea, in other respects unlike the sophists, required the same amount. Since the price for teaching wisdom was so high, it was natural that there should be chaffering about it, and that an agreement upon reasonable terms should be sought. Hippias earned, while yet a young man, in connection with Protagoras, in a short time, 150 minæ. Even from a small city he earned more than twenty minæ, not by long courses of lessons, as it seems, but by a shorter method of proceeding. But gradually the increased number of teachers reduced the price. Evenus of Paros, as early as the time of Socrates, required, to the general derision, only ten minæ (£35 or $175); while for the same sum Isocrates taught the whole art of oratory. And this appears to have been in the age of Lycurgus, the usual honorary of a teacher of eloquence. At length the Socratic philosophers found it convenient to teach for a compensation. Aristippus was the first who did so. Moreover, payment was also sometimes required from each auditor for single discourses, as, for example, by Prodicus, one, two, four, to fifty drachmæ. Antiphon was the first who wrote speeches and orations for money. He required high prices for them.[b]

SCHOOLS, TEACHERS, AND BOOKS

It is remarkable that the frequent notices which occur of schoolmasters and their schools, supply so little clear information as to the habits or social position of this important part of the community; nor does it appear whether they were a distinct class, or merely a lower grade of sophists or rhetors. They seem, however, to have belonged to the upper rank of citizens in some states, and to have been received in the best circles. Such as they were, the lessons they taught were limited to the Greek tongue. Instruction in foreign languages was never esteemed in Greece either a necessary or an important branch of general education. This is a peculiarity which forms also a signal defect of Greek culture as compared with that of modern times.

In Athens, and probably in other Greek republics, every citizen was under at least a moral obligation to provide his sons with a competent knowledge of letters. The discipline of the schools was also under state control. Yet the government nowhere seems to have provided or maintained them, or to have appointed or paid the schoolmasters, whose livelihood depended on the fees of their pupils. The amount of those fees has not been recorded. But more distinct notices have been transmitted of the charges made by literary professors of the higher class. The fees said to have been paid for a course of instruction to some of the earlier and more distinguished sophists and philosophers are so extravagant as to be scarcely credible, even when attested, as they are in some instances, by the best contemporaneous authority. Protagoras is taunted by Plato as the first professor of the higher branches of learning who taught for hire. If this imputation be well founded, his older contemporaries, Zeno and Gorgias, must have been speedily led to follow his example: for Zeno is said by Plato himself to have been paid 100 minæ, or upwards of £400 [$2000], by each disciple, for a course of lectures; and Gorgias also to have been richly remunerated by his pupils. The fees of both Protagoras and Gorgias are rated by other authorities at the same amount as those of Zeno. This sum, taking into account the high value of the precious metals in ancient times, would be equal to about £2000, or $10,000. But prices were afterwards greatly reduced, as the number of professors increased, and the former blind veneration for their magic powers of communicating knowledge, or for the value of the knowledge communicated, declined. Isocrates, the younger contemporary of Protagoras, and probably the better master of the two, was satisfied with ten minæ [£40 or $200] for the course; which sum seems afterwards to have remained the ordinary rate of payment.

No distinct notice occurs of the existence, during the Attic period, either at Athens or elsewhere, of a public library, in the familiar sense of a miscellaneous collection of books for the use of the citizens; although, as in the time of Pisistratus, standard editions of the popular works recited at public solemnities, and more especially of the dramas of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, were preserved at Athens under the charge of the city clerk. Private libraries had, however, already become sufficiently voluminous or curious to merit being specially recorded. Such were those of Euripides, the poet, and of Plato, part of whose collection was purchased at Tarentum, in Italy, from the heirs of its former proprietor, Philolaus, and another part at Syracuse; those of Euthydemus mentioned by Xenophon, of Aristotle, of Nicocrates of Cyprus, and of the Athenian archon, Euclides. The varied character of the works stored in the library of a literary professor, towards the close of this period, is illustrated by a scene in a comedy of Alexis, the humour of which turns on the gluttony of Hercules, a hero habitually burlesqued for that failing in Greek satirical literature. The youthful demigod, when directed by his master, the poet Linus, to select the book he preferred from his preceptor’s collection,--described as containing the poems of Homer, Orpheus, Hesiod, Chœrilus, Epicharmus, the tragedians, and the popular prose classics,--makes choice of a cookery book.

That books of all kinds, then commonly in use, abounded during the greater part of the Attic period appears, not only from the general familiarity which the educated ranks possessed with the text of the national classics, but still more from the absence of any allusion to a scarcity of copies as interposing a serious obstacle to the attainment of such knowledge. The book trade, as a distinct branch of commerce, seems indeed to have been still limited, as in truth it was, comparatively, in every age prior to the invention of printing; and remained, probably in a great measure, in the hands of professional copyists.

Booksellers, however, and a book mart at Athens, are mentioned by authors flourishing during the Peloponnesian War; and occasional notices occur of book scribes or copyists, and of bookbinding. A trade in books or paper is also mentioned by Xenophon as having been carried on about the same date, between Greece and the coasts of the Euxine Sea. A considerable time, however, seems to have been required to bring the works, even of the most popular authors, into general circulation; and the disciples of distinguished philosophers, Hermodorus for example, a scholar of Plato, appear to have made profit by being the first to transport copies of their masters’ lectures into distant localities.[c]

THE POSITION OF A WIFE IN ATHENS

It was generally the father who chose a wife for his son, looking less to her person than to her family and dowry. This is one of the respects in which the historic position of women differed from the heroic. No longer does the man with splendid gifts win a wife from many suitors; the father must dower his daughter appropriately in order to place her with a husband, and so the daughter often appeared as a burden to the family; so, also, the foundations of petticoat government in marriage were often laid, since the man was only the usufructuary, not the owner of the dowry. How much equality of fortune was considered, and how much a poor family, unable to offer a dowry itself, shrank from the proposals of a rich man, one may gather from the Trinummus of Plautus, in which the whole action turns upon this point. Lesbonicus, who is unable to dower his sister, says to the suitor in the play: “I will not have you think how you can help my poverty; think, rather, that I, though poor, am not dishonourable, so people shall not say that I have let you have my own sister for a mistress, without any dowry like this, rather than for a wife.”

Very often young men were obliged by their fathers to marry, that they might at last be reclaimed from a disorderly life, and thereby, also, discharging their duty to the state. This is what happens, for instance, to the libertine Lesbonicus in the same play by Plautus. Resignedly he receives the news that he is betrothed: “I will have her, this one or that one, any one you like”; whereon the father-in-law comments, “A hundred wives would not be punishment enough for his sins!” The ancients themselves felt the unkindness that lay in this treatment of girls. The feeling is most strongly expressed in a fragment of Sophocles, where young maidens complain:

“But when, light of heart, we reach the time of maidenhood, we are cast from the house and sold, far from the home-gods and mother and father; and yet, when the wedding is over, we must sing praises and believe that it is right as it is.”

We cannot wonder if in the early days of marriage the atmosphere was often cold, the heavens clouded. For this reason Plato wished that before marriage there should be a nearer acquaintance between the interested persons, so that no one should be deceived; and he proposed the arranging of special games, in which young men and maidens should perform dances. The statement, however, that no free-born Athenian ever married from love and passionate inclination is a gross exaggeration, the outcome of a one-sided and prejudiced view. In many comedies the plot turns on a young man’s passion for a maiden who in the end is discovered to be a citizen, and generally the lost daughter of a rich man. And every one must remember the glorified love of the prince’s son Hæmon for the heroic Antigone. It is incredible that in these instances the author presented situations that never occurred in the actual world. But other indications are to be found. If we look up the life of Cimon, for instance, in Plutarch, we shall find the following passages:

“But when Callias came, a rich Athenian who had fallen in love with Elpinice, and begged that he might pay her father’s fine for him, she consented, and her brother Cimon gave her to Callias for a wife. So much is certain that Cimon loved his wife Isodice too passionately and made himself too unhappy over her death, if one may judge by the elegies composed for his consolation.”

Only we must not think that such a passion was “romantic” in the modern sense; its birth was more natural and sensual, and it did not rise to a transcendent deification of the beloved. Sometimes it may well have happened that love put in an appearance after marriage, as in The Mother-in-law of Terence, where Pamphilus, attracted by the noble qualities of the wife he once despised, gradually becomes untrue to his mistress. The peculiarly prosaic and cool relations that existed between man and wife, along with the leading motive for marriage, is most clearly expressed in a document of the highest interest to the historian of morals, the speech against the courtesan Neæra, which is attributed to Demosthenes. “Mistresses,” he says, “are kept for pleasure, and housekeepers for daily attendance and personal service; but a man marries a woman that he may beget legitimate children, of the same station on both sides, and have a faithful guardian in the house.”

Companionable intercourse between man and wife was necessarily hindered by the sharp division between their occupations, and reduced itself, no doubt, to very few hours in the day. “Because,” Ischomachus says, “it is better for a woman to stay in than to be away from home, whereas it is ignominious for a man to stay at home and not concern himself with what is going on in the world.” So, in the same piece of Xenophon, Socrates says to Aristobulus: “Is there any one to whom you talk less than to your wife?” And the disciple answers, “No one, or at least very few.” We learn, however, from comedies and other sources, that in reality things did not wear so sorry an aspect, and that feminine curiosity and jealousy led to all sorts of questions and talks. On the other hand, there was no question of any intercourse with other men; in fact a wife withdrew if her husband, by chance, brought a guest home with him. If the husband were not at home it would have been reckoned a gross incivility for another man to enter the house. Indeed, Demosthenes mentions a case where a friend, who had been summoned by a servant for help, did not venture into the house because the master was away. So what Cornelius Nepos says about the Greek woman is true: “She does not appear at dinner except among relatives; she stays in the inner part of the house where no one is admitted but her nearest kinsmen.”

Euripides, indeed, went so far as to forbid the visits of women among themselves, for he writes in the Andromache: “Never, never--for I do not say it only for this one occasion--ought intelligent men, who are married, to allow other women to visit their wives, for they are the teachers of wickedness. One corrupts the marriage because she gains something by it, another wants a companion in sinning.” But things were not so bad on the whole in this respect either. In the Regiment of Women, by Aristophanes, a neighbour says to Blephyrus, who misses his wife when he gets up in the morning, “What can it be? Do you think one of her friends has asked her to breakfast, perhaps?” And the husband answers, “I think that must be it. After all, she is not so bad as that comes to, so far as I know.”

Phidias symbolised the solitariness of the home-keeping wife by the tortoise, on whose back he set the statue of Aphrodite Urania in Elis. But the acutest note of women’s relations to the outer world is in the Thesmophoriazusæ of Aristophanes, where the women speak themselves: “If we are an evil, why do you marry us, and allow us neither to go out, nor to be caught looking from the windows, and insist on guarding the evil with so much care? And if a woman goes out and you find her before the door, you get into a rage, whereas you ought to be pleased and bring a thank offering, if you were really rid of the evil and did not find her sitting there any more when you came home. Then when we take a peep out of the window every man wants to look at the evil, and when one blushes and draws in one’s head, they all want all the more to see the evil peep out.” Even on occasions when fear and necessity would break through conventional restrictions, we find the women going no farther than the door of the house; and the orator Lycurgus actually complains because after the battle of Chæronea, the women inquired after the fate of their own men-folk from their doorways.

Walking in the street was made a very difficult matter even for married women. Even Solon left directions on this subject; and among other things he said that no woman, when she went out, must have more than three pieces of clothing, nor more than one obolus’ worth of food and drink with her, nor must she carry any basket of more than two feet. Also she must not travel by night, except in a carriage, and then have a light carried before her. In the times of the Diadochi, indeed, special superintendents were appointed in Athens to check the immorality and extravagance of women, such as were already established in other cities, Syracuse, for example. Since the husband generally did the marketing himself, and walks had not yet, it would seem, become fashionable, although they were recommended by a woman disciple of Pythagoras, Phintys, there were hardly any other motives left for going out except the attendance at religious functions and the play.[d]

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XXVIII. ART OF THE PERICLEAN AGE

ARCHITECTURE

[Sidenote: [460-430 B.C.]]

Policy united with natural inclination to induce Pericles to patronise the arts, and call forth their finest productions for the admiration and delight of the Athenian people. The Athenian people were the despotic sovereign; Pericles the favourite and minister, whose business it was to indulge the sovereign’s caprices that he might direct their measures; and he had the skill often to direct even their caprices. That fine taste, which he possessed eminently, was in some degree general among the Athenians; and the gratification of that fine taste was one means by which he retained his influence. Works were undertaken, according to the expression of Plutarch, in whose time they remained still perfect, of stupendous magnitude, and in form and grace inimitable; all calculated for the accommodation or in some way for the gratification of the multitude. Phidias was superintendent of the works: under him many architects and artists were employed, whose merit entitled them to fame with posterity, and of whose labours (such is the hardness of the Attic marble, their principal material, and the mildness of the Attic atmosphere) relics, which have escaped the violence of men, still, after the lapse of more than two thousand years, exhibit all the perfection of design, and even of workmanship, which earned that fame.[c]

But the Greeks had not attained all at once to the architectural perfection which we admire on the Acropolis. They had assigned their gods the crest of the mountains or the deep forests for their first abode; they desired to have them nearer to themselves and, from the earliest times, they built them dwellings, at first rustic and clumsy, but which were gradually embellished and attracted other arts with religious pomp; the poets celebrating the gods and their native country, the philosophers raising the great problems of nature and of the soul. The temple was the centre of Hellenic life.

But the gods, like men, have to reckon with time. Before sending out the radiations of their divine majesty from the midst of the wonders of art, those destined to become the glorious dwellers on Olympus were at first obscure and indefinite personalities, inhabiting the trunk of an oak, then wretched wooden structures, and later on houses of stone and sometimes of brass, like the Athene Chalciœcus of Sparta. It was only with the progress of civilised life that their habitation grew in size and loftiness. The true temples, and the most ancient of them, those of Corinth, Samos, and Metapontum--date only from the seventh century.

The Greeks were acquainted neither with the pointed arch nor the dome. Some have thought to find that at Tiryns and Mycenæ, but if some of the bays and galleries end in a point, it is because the courses draw closer and closer together and end by meeting at the top. The method is therefore clumsy and barbarous; it was abandoned for the lintel and the pediment.

All the Greek temples resemble one another in their general plan of construction; and yet the architectural combinations might be very numerous, inasmuch as they all differ in the nature of the material employed and the ornamentation which decorates them, in the number of the columns and the size of the intercolumniations, which determine the proportions of the edifice, above all in the character peculiar to each of the three orders--the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian. A single member of the structure, the column with the portion of the entablature which it supports, determines this character.

The first temples worthy of the name were in the Doric style. The walls were large and heavy, the columns short and stunted without any base, like the stake which had been the primitive support, but with flutings, a capital, and a double pediment stretching above a wide face, like an eagle with outstretched wings--the expression is Pindar’s. The whole edifice, built of ordinary stone, was hidden, as in the case of many of the Egyptian temples, under a coat of stucco which displayed vivid colours. The remains of this are to be seen at Assus, on the coast of Asia; at Corinth, Delphi and Ægina in Greece; at Syracuse, Agrigentum and Selinus in Sicily; at Metapontum and especially at Pæstum in Italy, where the grandest ruins in the ancient Doric order are to be found. The common characteristic of these buildings, which nearly all belong to the seventh or sixth century, was their sturdy but heavy and thick-set appearance. The columns have a height of only four diameters--four and two-thirds at most; and the stucco in coming off has displayed the poverty of the material employed. Even the temple of Olympia was built of a hard and porous tufa which the stucco had concealed under a brilliant covering. That of Ægina was also of stone, not marble; there remain of it at least some beautiful ruins.

We must go to Athens to find Doric architecture in its severe elegance. Even in the temple of Ægina the column is higher: five and a third diameters; at the Theseum it is five and a half; at the Parthenon, six, and this is the proportion which is most pleasing to the eye. Of these three temples the first, in which we can still find traces of an archaic character, belongs to the sixth century; the second, which has better proportions, to the first half of the fifth; the third is the architectural triumph of the age of Pericles.

The Parthenon, built entirely of Pentelic marble, is not the most vast of the Greek temples, but its execution is more perfect and it is this which made it the masterpiece of Hellenic art. A very small detail will show the finish of the work. It is with difficulty and by the assistance of eye and hand that one succeeds in discovering the joints of the tambours forming the colonnade which surrounds the building, so skilfully have these enormous masses been adjusted. Even in her masons Athens possessed artists.

The interior of the Parthenon contained two halls: the smaller at the back, the opisthodomus, enclosed the public treasure; the larger, or cella, contained the statue of the goddess born without mother from the thought of the master of the gods, and who was as the soul of which the Parthenon was the material casing. Figures in high relief, about twice life size, adorned the two pediments of the temple. The frieze, which ran round the cella and opisthodomus at a height of thirteen metres (42 ft., 8 ins.), and to a length of more than one hundred and sixty metres (525 ft.), represented the procession of the great Panathenæa.

The work was finished in 435 B.C. It is neither the centuries nor the barbarians that have mutilated it. The Parthenon was still almost intact in 1687, when on the 27th of September Morosini bombarded the citadel. One of the projectiles, setting fire to the barrels of powder stored in the temple, blew up a part of it; then the Venetian desired that the statues should be taken down from the pediment and he broke them. Lord Elgin, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, tore down the bas-reliefs of the frieze and the metopes: this was another disaster. The Ilissus or Cephisus, the Hercules or Theseus, the Charities, “vernal goddesses”--called by some the Three Fates, by others Demeter, Core, and Iris--are still, though somewhat mutilated, the most precious of our relics of antiquity. In 1812 some other Englishmen carried off the frieze of the temple of Phigalia (Bassæ), built by Ictinus. All these fragments of masterpieces were sold for hard cash, and it is under the damp and gloomy sky of England that we are reduced to admiring the remains of that which was the imperial mantle which Pericles wrapped about Pallas Athene. Thus to understand the incomparable magnificence of the Parthenon, we must render back to it in imagination what men have taken away, then place it on its lofty rock, one hundred and fifty-six metres (512 ft.) high, whence a magic panorama is unrolled before the eyes, and surround it with the buildings of the Acropolis; the Erechtheum, which exhibited all the graces of art, beside the severe grandeur of the principal temple; the bronze statue of Athene Promachus, “she who fought in the front rank,” to which the artist gave a colossal height, so that the sailors arriving from the high sea steered by the plume on her helmet and the gold tip of her lance, maris stella; and lower down, at the only place by which the rock was accessible, the wonderful vestibule of the Propylæa and the temple of Victory which formed one of its wings; but, above all, it must be seen wrapped in the blazing light of the eastern sky, compared to which our clearest day is but a twilight.

One thing has been observed in the Parthenon which proves the profound artistic sense the Greeks possessed and how well they understood how to correct geometry by taste. In all the Parthenon there is no surface which is absolutely flat. As the columns owe their full beauty only to the fact that they exhibit towards their centre a slight outward curve, of which the eye is not aware, so the entire building, colonnades and walls, is inclined slightly inwards towards an invisible point which would be lost in the region of the clouds, and all the horizontal lines are convex. But all with such delicacy that it is sufficient to allow the eye and the light to wander gently over the surfaces and to give the monument at once the grace of art and the solidity of strength; but not enough for it to assume the compressed and heavy aspect of a truncated pyramid like the Egyptian temples. On the southern façade the rise of the curve is only one hundred and twenty-three millimetres (about 4½ inches).

The Propylæa, the masterpiece of civil and military architecture, belonged, like the Parthenon, to the Doric order, and stood at the only accessible point of the Acropolis. The architect Mnesicles disposed its various parts in such a manner as to give an aspect of grandeur to the entrance to the Holy of Holies of pagan Athens and also to secure its defence. Epaminondas would have transported it to Thebes to adorn the Cadmea: six centuries after, Pausanias admired it more than the Parthenon, and Plutarch said: “These works have preserved a freshness, a virginity which time cannot wither; they appear still bright with youth as if a breath would animate them and as if they had an immortal soul.”

Athens had other monuments which were erected at very diverse epochs: the Anaceum, the temple of Castor and Pollux, where the sale of slaves took place; the Pantheon or temple of all the gods, the work of the emperor Hadrian; the octagonal Tower of the Winds, an indifferent work built about the first century before Christ. On each of its eight sides, corresponding to the quarters of the principal winds, was sculptured the figure of one of them. This tower still exists, as well as the choragic monument erected by the choregus Lysicrates, in 334 B.C., on the occasion of the victory of the Acamantid tribe in a chorus. The remains of the theatre of Bacchus are still to be seen on the south-eastern slope of the citadel, some of the marble seats bearing very beautiful sculptures. But the Stadium beyond the Ilissus, according to Pausanias one of the wonders of Athens, has disappeared and the excavations made there produced nothing remarkable.

Like its capital, Attica too had monuments of victory, of patriotic pride, and pious gratitude to the gods: and all these monuments were constructed in the severe style whose principal models we have just studied. In the sacred city of Eleusis, in sight of Salamis, a vast religious edifice was built, capable of containing the multitude of those initiated into the mysteries of Ceres. Rhamnus which overlooks the plain of Marathon, raised a sanctuary to Nemesis, the goddess of just vengeance; and on the summit of Cape Sunium, two temples consecrated to Poseidon and Athene, the tutelary deities of Attica, signalised from afar, to sailors coming from the isles or the coast of Asia, their approach to the ground where the Persians had found a tomb and the Greeks liberty. When on the days of the sacred festivals, the people arrived in long theoria (embassies) at the promontory now called Cape Colonna, they saw extending at their feet that sea which had now become their own domain, and fervently thanked the two divinities for having given them: for their leaders, political wisdom; for their mariners, favourable winds. At a later time philosophy was to take its seat near the temple of the gods, and we, like it, believe that Sunium heard some of the discourses of Plato.

The school of Athens extended her influence to distant places. It did not build the temple of Olympia, but Phidias made the statue of Zeus; Pæonius of Mende and Alcamenes of Lemnos have been credited, without absolute proof, with the sculptures of the two pediments, on one of which was represented the combat of Pelops and Œnomaus, and on the other the contests of the Lapithæ and Centaurs at the nuptials of Pirithous.

Time, barbarians, perhaps fire, destroyed the temple, and the Alpheus, in overflowing its banks, covered the plain of Altis which Pausanias had seen in such beauty with eight or ten metres (about 26 or 32 ft.) of alluvium. Before the Expédition de Morée, which brought away some fragments for the Louvre, even the spot in which so much magnificence stood was unknown. The successful excavations of the German commission have brought to light a victory of Pæonius, a Hermes of Praxiteles and other masterpieces.

The Ionic style is also native to the coast of Asia, where the Doric had preceded it. It was exhibited there in all its grace in the sixth century, when the temple of Ephesus was erected. The Cretan Chersiphron and his son Metagenes began its construction, which was carried on, like that of our Gothic cathedrals, with a tardiness that extended it over two or three centuries. Its columns, several of which were given by Crœsus, had a height of eight diameters, with bases which lacked the Doric columns and voluted capitals which the ancients compared to the drooping curls of a woman’s hair. Of the Ionic temple at Samos, burned by the Persians, a single column remains upright, and according to the diameter of the base it was sixteen metres (about 52½ ft.) high. This temple was therefore a colossal structure. At Athens the Erechtheum and the temple of the Wingless Victory are in the same style, but of very small dimensions. The first contained the oldest image of Athene: a statue of olive wood which was said to have fallen from heaven. In the second was a warlike Minerva; in order to attach her permanently to the fortunes of Athens, the sculptor had not given her the wings which are the attributes of the fickle goddess of lucky battles.

In the time of Pericles the Corinthian style has not yet appeared but is about to do so. It is related that Callimachus, having seen on a child’s tomb at Corinth, a basket filled with its playthings and enveloped in the graceful curves of the leaves of an acanthus, took from it the idea of the Corinthian capital. The date of his birth is unknown, but since Ictinus after the plague of Athens, and Scopas in 396 constructed, the one at Phigalia, the other at Tegea, two temples in which traces have been found of the new style of architecture, its invention must have followed very soon after the construction of the Propylæa.

There is a question concerning Greek architecture which has only been answered in our own day, that of polychromy. In spite of our very decided preference for bare stone, we have been forced to recognise that the Greeks had a different taste. Light and colour are the joy of the eyes; but their rôle is not the same in countries in which the sky often appears like a shroud suspended above the earth, and in those where that earth, animated by the sun, sings, with its thousand voices, the poem of nature. In the north a wan light casts gloom upon the monuments; thus we are not loath to build them with materials which at first give them a dazzling whiteness. In the south they are too vividly illuminated, and the dazzling brightness of the marble would burn the eyes if the sun did not clothe the stone in a golden tint which rests the gaze. Colour, unnecessary and somewhat incommoding to the sculptor, whose main concern is with the form and truth of outline, furnishes the architect on the contrary with a valuable means of animating the great flat surfaces which in their nakedness would be cold and lifeless. He does not, like the polychromic sculptor, seek to create a deceitful illusion; colour and ornamentation make no false pretence, and are a charm the more when, in the case of a building standing in the midst of a sacred wood, it establishes a needful harmony between the work of art and that of nature.

Egypt and Asia were prodigal of colour, whether in painting or by the use of enamelled faiences with which the monuments of Persia are still covered. The most ancient inhabitants of Hellas passed under their influence. Colour has been found on the walls of dwellings older than Homer by ten centuries; it was to be seen at Tiryns, one of the capitals of the heroic age, and on the prows of the first ships which ventured into the midst of the waves. This usage continued through the epochs which succeeded; but, as in every domain of art, the Greeks modified this legacy of their ancestors and of the peoples which had preceded them in civilised life, according to the requirements of a delicate taste. Hues more or less vivid covered the stone of the temple, even the sculptures of the frieze, the metopes, and the pediment; terra-cottas, whose colours mixed with a kind of paste were indestructible, decorated the upper parts of the monument and enlivened these severe structures. But a distinction must be drawn between the polychromy of Athens in the time of Pericles and that of other Hellenic countries. In Sicily, in greater Greece, even in Ægina, where the materials which the architects had to dispose of were of a coarse description, it may be that the temples received a brilliant colouring. But at Athens the beautiful Pentelic marble employed in the construction of the temples was certainly not entirely concealed under crude and violent colours. The words of Plutarch, quoted above, on the freshness and youth preserved by the monuments of the Acropolis, when six centuries had already passed over them, does not allow us to believe in more than a moderate colouration for the columns and walls. At one point only of the building there was certainly greater variety. In all countries women, who are ingenious artists, apply themselves to adorning their heads, and with reason: it is the stronghold from which formidable arrows are shot. Ictinus also decorated the upper portions of the Parthenon with all the graces he could call into play. Ornaments of gilt bronze fastened to the draperies of the figures, inlaid enamels, and magnificent carvings running all along the frieze. On festival days treasures and garlands were added, so that the edifice wore on its brow, as it were, a crown of flowers and foliage over a circlet of precious stones.

Antiquity has preserved us no details concerning the artists; we are ignorant of even the native country of most of them. For centuries their works spoke for them, but the very ruins of the monuments they raised have perished. Only the Parthenon still proudly lifts its mutilated head above the mass of rubbish.

A great poet saw a gloomy vision of Europe dying and Paris vanishing. Twenty-five centuries before, Thucydides drew a less poetic but more faithful fantasy for Athens and Lacedæmon. Comparing the sterility of the one to the fertility of the other, he said: “Let both towns be destroyed and the mere débris of the monuments and temples of Athens will reveal a glorious city; the ruins of Lacedæmon will be only those of a large village.”

SCULPTURE

Art is a natural instinct which is to be found even amongst the last of the savages who were the prehistoric inhabitants of Gaul, and which the most intelligent of animals do not possess. This instinct is developed or arrested, not, as has been said, according to race, but in response to the social influences to which a people is subjected amidst melancholy and severe or peaceful and smiling scenes which extinguish or call forth the creative imagination. These influences, working through the centuries, predisposed Hellas to change the paths which art had been pursuing in the East; and habits which were easily acclimatised in Greece, but which could not have had their birth on the banks of the Nile and Euphrates, favoured this slow evolution.

Thanks to a good system of education, to long-continued gymnastic exercises and to a life in the open air, often without clothing and always without a dress which could hamper the harmonious development of the body, the Greeks became the most beautiful race under the sun. As they had always before their eyes the ephebi, so agile in the race, the wrestlers and the athletes, who displayed so much virile grace, the æsthetic sense developed in them with a strength which, when nature had given genius to the artists, produced masterpieces. Religion still further increased this tendency. Their gods having been conceived in the image of man, as a superior humanity, the sculptors, as the religious conscience grew more elevated and taste was purified, took their ideal for the representations of the dwellers on Olympus from human beauty carried to perfection. The people even looked upon it as a gift of heaven, and after death men were accorded heroic honours on account of their beauty.

Herodotus has preserved us a fact which exhibits the Greek character: Philip of Croton was venerated as a hero after his death, in a small building erected to him because he was the most beautiful man of his time, and the old historian agrees with the Egestans who had made this singular kind of god. He does not ask if Xerxes had truly royal qualities. “In his vast army,” he says, “none was more worthy by his beauty of the sovereign power.” In one of the choregiæ in which he often triumphed by his magnificence, Nicias had given the part of Dionysus to a young slave so perfectly handsome and so nobly attired that on his appearance the people broke into applause. Nicias liberated him at once, considering, he said, that it was an impiety to retain in servitude a man who had been hailed by the Athenians in the character of a god. Nicias indeed was performing a very popular act; it was the handsome ephebus, not the god, who had excited the admiration of the spectators.

From first to last Greece thought thus. Many a time in the Odyssey, Ulysses and Telemachus fancy that they see a god when they unexpectedly encounter a tall and beautiful man; and the cold and severe Aristotle writes: “If amongst mortals any were born resembling the images of the gods, the rest of mankind would agree in swearing to them an eternal obedience.” Simonides, without going so far, made beauty the second of the four conditions necessary to happiness, and Isocrates said: “Virtue is so honoured only because it is moral beauty.” It was because he was the most beautiful of the ephebi that Sophocles was charged, after Salamis, with the task of leading the chorus which sung the hymn of victory; and it is said Phidias engraved on the finger of Zeus at Olympia: “Pantarces is beautiful”--a sacrilege which might have exposed him to great danger. We no longer possess this inscription, but we find a similar one on a painted vase, where Victory is offering a crown to a handsome ephebus. The gods themselves had the reputation of being sensible of this advantage, which had procured many mortals the honour of their love. At Ægium Jupiter desired that his priests should be chosen from among the young men who had carried off the prize for beauty; for this merit Ganymede was snatched up to heaven, that he might serve as cup-bearer to the gods, and Apollo admitted into his sanctuary the statue of Phryne, the most admired of the courtesans of Greece. It is notorious how Hyperides saved the beautiful hetæra from a capital charge, when she was standing before the judges, by simply tearing away at an appropriate moment the veil which hid her beauty. The recollection of these facts serves to explain the divine honours paid to Antinoüs by the most Grecian of the Roman emperors; but they also show how much this worship of beauty, of which the Greeks had made a religion and from which Plato was to weave a theory, went to form the artists, and, to a certain extent, the philosophers of Greece. Did not Plato utter words whence has been legitimately derived the famous saying that Beauty is the splendour of goodness? The jurisconsults of the Roman empire called themselves the priests of law; Phidias and Polyclitus might have styled themselves the priests of the beautiful; and this trait suffices to mark the difference between the two civilisations, the Greek and the Roman. Beauty is the perpetual aspiration of the French spirit which seeks it in everything, in the great spectacles of nature or in the works of famous writers and artists.

Amongst the statues of which the ancients were most proud, are some which amaze us by their colossal height, and others which shock our taste by the diversity of the colours and materials employed. The Egyptians treated their Pharaohs and their gods in a similar fashion, as did the Persians their kings, the Athenians the people or the senate personified, and we ourselves do the same to translate certain ideas: the Saint Borromeo of Lake Maggiore and the Liberty of New York are colossi. Executed to be seen from afar, they strike the eye by their mass, and are the expression in stone of elevated sentiments: of holiness, patriotism, or independence. On the promontory where they are placed between earth and heaven they appear as the very genius of the people which erected them, a shining witness of their gratitude, and the figurative representation of their inmost thought.

The art of colossal sculpture was at the service of the gods, and was in its place in or near their temples. It was the same with the chryselephantine sculpture, and for the same reasons. The most celebrated of these sculptures and those which from ancient descriptions we know the best, were the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia.

Reaching with her pedestal to a height of fifteen metres (about 49 ft.), Minerva stood erect, enveloped in a talaric tunic, the dress of virgins. In one hand she held a Victory, in the other the spear round which the serpent Erichthonius was coiled. The draperies were of gold, the naked parts of ivory, the head of Medusa, on the Ægis, in silver, the eyes being of precious stones.

How did this Minerva, which was seen by Julian as late as the fourth century of our era, finally perish? The Christians have been charged with this, but the accusation should be brought against her wealth. So much gold could not escape the barbarians, whoever they were, whether invaders from the north, needy princes, or ordinary thieves. The pillage of the Parthenon had already begun in the time of Isocrates and the Athene of Julian must have been only a ruin.

Phidias was also summoned to Olympia. The treasures accumulated in the temple from the offerings of all Greece, permitted him to execute a work which surpassed that of the Parthenon. On a throne of cedar wood, inlaid with gold and ivory, ebony, and precious stones, and covered with bas-reliefs and paintings, Zeus was majestically seated. His thick hair and beard were of gold; of gold and ivory was the Victory he carried in his right hand, in token that his will was always triumphant; of gold, too, mingled with other metals was the royal sceptre surmounted by an eagle, which he held in his left hand. On the head was the crown of olive leaves, which was given to the victors in the games, but, as was fitting, that of the god was gold, as well as his sandals and his mantle, which revealed his naked breast in ivory. His visage had the virile beauty proper to the father of gods and men; his tranquil gaze was indeed that of the all-powerful whom no passion stirs and behind whose broad forehead should reside the vast intelligence of the orderer of worlds. Placed at the back of the naos, at the point where the trend of the architectural lines attracted the gaze, the statue, fifteen or sixteen metres (49 or 52 ft.) high, seemed still more colossal than it was.

The Olympian Jupiter shared the fate of the Minerva of the Parthenon; he was too rich for an age grown too barbarous and beliefs too hostile. It is said that in 393 Theodosius had it transported to Constantinople, where it perished some years later in one of the great conflagrations that so often visited the new capital of the Empire; it is not likely that it was so long respected. Already in the second century Lucian laughs at this “honest fellow, the exterminator of giants, who remained seated so quietly while brigands shaved his golden hair.”

Other towns besides Athens and Olympia had chryselephantine statues. Costly materials were used for the Juno at Argos, the Æsculapius of Epidaurus, and others.

Phidias did not confine himself to representing gods, that is to say to making colossi; with his own hands, or more often through those who worked under his direction, he lavished less divine sculpture on the frieze, the metopes, and the double pediment of the temple, the figures of which, as seen from below, do not appear to be of more than ordinary height. Those which he chiselled on Minerva’s shield and on her sandals, were still smaller. The magnificent fragments which remain to us from the two pediments, Demeter and Core, Iris and Cephisus, the Charities or Fates, the Hercules or Theseus, are the works of his school and we may say of his mind. In spite of their mutilations, these marbles, like those of the Victory untying her sandal, may be ranged beside, if not above, the most glorious creations of Renaissance sculpture in the purity of the style and the calm serenity of the figures, which neither have their limbs twisted in violent action nor their brows overcharged with thought, as happened when statuary strove to rival painting. What a puissant life is in these divinities tranquilly seated in the pediments, and how calm on their fiery horses are the riders in the Panathenaic procession! Later on the school of grace and voluptuousness will appear, with an Athenian, Praxiteles, as its chief; still later, passion will agitate the marble: then the decay of art begins--such a drama as the “Farnese bull”[46] depicts may not fittingly be presented in stone.

It is to the eternal honour of Phidias that he finally broke with hieratic art, whose influence is still traceable in the beautiful statues of Ægina, with their admirably studied but lifeless shapes and grinning heads exhibiting, even in pain and death, the same idiotic smile. The great artist sought the beauty which is the spiritual essence of things, whether it be in the soul seen through the body; or nature contemplated in her most harmonious expansion; and this ideal beauty he realised without making the effort visible. This is supreme art; for there is no grandeur without simplicity.

PAINTING, MUSIC, ETC.

If the description in the Iliad of the shield of Achilles is a work of imagination, those of the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia, as given by Pausanias after an attentive study of the works themselves, show that the school of Athens had carried the art of carving metal and ivory to a high degree of perfection, as well as that of working hard stones for casts or in relief. Yet this skill was borrowed from the school of Argos, where work in bronze was held in high honour.

It was not so with painting, which in Greece had never the perfection of statuary, whatever may be said on the faith of anecdotes more famous than veracious. Modern painting seeks to move; that of the ancients was rather sculptural in its character, in the sense that it sacrificed colouring to design and the effects of light and shade to form--a stranger to what might be called, if we have Rembrandt in mind, the drama of light and shade, or, in referring to the Venetians, the harmonious chant of colours. Sicyon was the first Greek town which had a school for design. Athens, Miletus, and subsequently Corinth, followed this example. We shall see presently that Greece had great painters, and that those of Athenian origin did not occupy the first rank in this art. But it would be rash to speak of Greek painting except according to the judgment of the ancients, since nothing of it remains save painted vases, which belong to industry rather than art; and the mural decorations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which are too often mere conventional productions, executed hurriedly and probably for small payment by workmen rather than artists. The Roman mosaics were also made by Greek hands, but there is not one, except the battle of Issus, which is of a high order of art.

The Greeks possessed the merit of realising that the highest intellectual culture is one of the conditions of greatness in the individual and the state; and they understood how to utilise every means of attaining it. In their plan of education, besides the study of poets and philosophers to form the mind, and gymnastic exercise to develop suppleness and strength, they included music, which habituates the mind to harmony, and dancing, which bestows grace. These two secondary arts were the chief ones at Lacedæmon; they also ranked high among the Athenians, though Athens did not set her mark on them as she did on architecture and the art of statuary. They were indispensable auxiliaries at festivals, sacrifices, and funerals, and played a part in the performance of religious rites. The marvellous effects of the lyre of Orpheus were universally kept in mind, and Achilles, the hero who was the ideal type of warlike courage, was represented celebrating his exploits on the cithara; in the Iliad or the Odyssey there is no feast to which a melodious singer is not invited. Down to the last days of Greece the beneficent action of music was believed in: Polybius attributed the misfortunes of the Arcadians to the neglect among them of the art which calms the passions and which, by teaching the rules of harmony, trains the learner not to violate public peace. Damon the musician, a friend of Pericles and of Socrates, held that musical methods could not be changed without threatening the foundation of morality and the laws of the city. Plato thinks the same, and Aristotle calls music “the greatest charm of life.” It is well known how much importance was attached to it by the school of the Pythagoreans, who professed to hear the music of the celestial spheres turning harmoniously through infinite space.

The Greeks also conceived of dancing in another fashion from ours, for they had introduced into it number and measure, which in art are a manifestation of beauty, but no longer remain so when whirling speed is substituted for grace. With them the dance formed part of their religious solemnities and military education. “The ancients,” says Plato in the Seventh Book of the Laws, “have bequeathed us a great number of beautiful dances.” In the Dorian cities dancing was one of the necessary rites in the worship of Apollo, and the gravest people participated. Theseus, returning from Crete, danced the γέρανος in the holy island of Delos, to celebrate his victory over the Minotaur; and the Spartans, in annual commemoration of their triumph over the people of Thyrea danced the γυμνοπαιδια before the images of Apollo, Diana, and Latona, singing verses of Aleman and the Cretan Thaletas. The Bacchic dances, with thyrsi and lighted torches, were a mimic representation of the life of Dionysus.

In the neighbourhood of Eleusis was to be seen the fountain of beautiful dances, Callichorum, where the initiated chanted the invocation to Iacchus as they danced: “O adored god, approach at our voice. Iacchus! Iacchus! come and dance the sacred thiasus in this meadow, thy well-beloved home; strike the ground with a bold foot and mingle in our free and joyous dances, inspired by the graces who rule our consecrated chorus.”

Plato, in his treatise on “Law,” which is a kind of commentary on Athenian legislation and customs, attaches extreme importance, even for the moral education of youth, to the possession by the ephebi of the “art of choruses,” which includes song and dance.

We may well believe that demoralising dances existed in Ionia and elsewhere. At Sparta and Athens the Pyrrhic dance was a military exercise and a patriotic training. The ephebi danced them at the greater and lesser Panathenæa, imitating all the movements of a combat for attack, defence, or the evasion of darts. And was not the heroic circle of the Suliote women a recollection of these warlike dances? Having taken refuge on the summit of a mountain to escape a harem or the yataghan of the Turks, they sang their funeral hymn, joined hands and danced on this narrow peak, which was surrounded by precipices. Each time that the ring approached the abyss, the circle was narrowed, for one of their number detached herself from it to fling herself down; and one after another, all threw themselves over.

THE ARTISTS OF THE OTHER CITIES OF HELLAS

[Sidenote: [460-410 B.C.]]

The fifth century is the golden age of Greek art. We have told of the artists whom Athens gave to the world; we shall now see what others the rest of Hellas produced--such at least whose names have come down to us with an indication of their works.

Chersiphron and his son Metagenes of Knossos, in Crete, are outside the period with which we are dealing, for they began the construction of the great temple of Ephesus in the sixth century.

The domain of statuary had a great artist whom the ancients have compared to Phidias, Polyclitus of Sicyon or Argos. The artists of the century of Pericles did not confine themselves to one corner of the regions of art; they cultivated the whole. Polyclitus was as much a skilful architect as a great sculptor. At Epidaurus he erected a circular monument, the Tholus, and a theatre which was much admired by the ancients; at Argos his Juno was the rival of the Minerva of the Parthenon, though it did not stand as high, and was less costly. Phidias lived with the gods in spirit, Polyclitus dwelt more among men. He even wrote on the proportions of the human body, and applied his knowledge to his Doryphorus, which was called the “canon,” or the “rule.” The ancients divided the palm for statuary between the two great artists: giving it to the one for his gods; to the other for his Canephorus, which Verres stole from the Sicilians, his Amazon, which triumphed over that of Phidias in the famous competition at Ephesus, and his statues of successful athletes, such as the Diadumenus and the two Astragalizontes, or dice-players. Myron, whom we might have included among the Athenian artists, went farther in his imitation of nature; his bronze cow was famous, and still more so his Discobolus, whose attitude must have been very difficult to render.

Polygnotus of Thasos, whom Cimon brought from that town in 463, lived for a long time on the banks of the Ilissus, and was given the rights of an Athenian citizen as a reward for his labours in the decoration of the temple of Theseus, the Anaceum, the Pœcile, and a part of the Propylæa. There was some stiffness in the designs of Polygnotus; his was a sculptural painting which, nevertheless, obtained great effects by very simple means. The ancients lauded the expression and beauty of his figures, but they have neither the grace nor the dramatic character which the painters of the period that followed were to give to their works. The arts of painting and statuary are two sisters who resemble each other, and both follow the variations of taste: the first with a vivacity at times imprudent, the second with more reserve. Zeuxis of Heraclea Pontica and his rival, Parrhasius of Ephesus, were younger than Polygnotus. Their painting was already more scientific, less ideal, and nearer reality. Aristotle reproaches Zeuxis with yielding too much to Ionian effeminacy. If we are to believe anecdotes whose frequent repetition does not make them more authentic, these painters even succeeded in deceiving the eye: the one with a bunch of grapes which the birds came to peck at, the other with a curtain which Zeuxis attempted to draw back, thinking that it concealed the real picture. These would be triumphs of ingenuity rather than art. It is to be noted that both men drew freely on the abundant resources of ancient poetry. Both attained to great fame and opulence. In spite of the misfortunes of the times, Greece still had gold for her favourite painters. Archelaus, king of Macedon, paid four hundred minæ for the painting of Zeuxis in his palace, and Parrhasius never appeared in public without a robe of purple fringed with gold. He considered himself “master of the elegancies,” as well as of his art, so we need not wonder at his having inclined to effeminate gracefulness. “His Theseus,” said Ephranor, “is fed on roses; mine was fed on meat.” But it was at a later time, with Lysippus and Pamphilus, that the school of Sicyon was to have its full splendour.

The sight of the sculptors and painters turning to Homer for their inspiration, calls forth the remark that the Iliad was the Bible of Greece, as much for art as for religion. As our churches of the Middle Ages constituted, by means of their windows, a grand book of religious instruction, so the walls and pediments of the Greek temples exhibited to the eye legends which spoke of the divinities and heroes of the Hellenic race. Thus, while in Rome art was to be merely a foreign importation, in Greece it came from the very heart of the country; and this was the secret of its greatness.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[46] A famous group now in the Museum at Naples.

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XXIX. GREEK LITERATURE

ORATORY AND LYRIC POETRY

Of all branches of literature there is none more closely interwoven with political life than oratory. This art could only have been developed among the Ionians, for no other race had the same innate taste for vivacious utterance, or the same feeling for fluency, copiousness, and brilliancy of speech. Nor is there any doubt that the kind of oratory which aims at influencing the feeling and directing the resolutions of the civic body was first practised in the cities of Ionia. But it was at Athens that Greek oratory was brought to its true perfection. There the public oration developed side by side with freedom of speech and the duty of speaking which was encumbent on every Attic citizen. It seemed so intimately connected with the life of Attica that the state of Theseus was represented as founded by it.

For this reason oratory was not the subject of a special study that could be conceived of apart from public life, but the simple expression of practical experience and statesman-like prudence; for at that period men could not have imagined a popular leader who was not at the same time a statesman proved in peace and war and had not won by his public career the right to be listened to by his fellow citizens. And as oratory grew into a power which dominated the life of the community, so language itself was advanced to a new stage in development, when Athens became the centre of the world. What grew out of the local dialect was a new idiom, in which the power inherent in the Greek language first came to its full maturity by becoming the vehicle of Attic culture.

The Greek language had undergone a many-sided development in Ionia. The Ionic dialect was the repository not only of the Homeric and post-Homeric epics and hymns, but of the whole treasure of elegiac and iambic poetry. Ionia was the first country to avail herself largely of the art of writing. This was first put to use in connection with the art of the country; the epic poems which had been composed without the aid of writing, and had become the property of the nation, were by its aid disseminated, cast into permanent form, and continued. Reading and writing were first introduced into the schools of the Rhapsodists, which is the reason why Homer himself is represented as a schoolmaster; and when the later epic poets--Arctinus, Lesches, and others--who sang in Ionia after the beginning of the Olympiads, made the great epic the starting-point of their own poems, in which they endeavoured to amplify, supplement, and connect the substance of the Iliad and the Odyssey, writing was a common accomplishment among poets, and the rhapsodic art itself took on more of the character of a science in consequence.

At this point, however, and in Ionia as before, there came into being a wholly novel method of literary statement, intended, not to rouse the emotions of a crowded audience, but to spread abroad the results of scientific research. Philosophers and historians wrote for the public in prose, and in the sixth century the taste for reading and writing spread with great rapidity through the whole of Ionia, where Samos, in particular, became a school for the cultivation of the art of writing.

At this time, however, prose did not develop in contrast to poetry; as yet no distinction was made between the two classes of composition. The colloquial language of ordinary life, the lively popular note, was simply adopted by writers of fables, and from the tales of Æsop the maxims of homely wit and wisdom passed into literature. Archilochus was fond of using them, so was Herodotus. Men were so accustomed to learn from the poets that even speculative philosophers set forth their theories in poetic garb, like Xenophanes, who wandered about reciting his doctrines in the form of a rhapsody. The narratives of Herodotus are composed with a view to stirring the listening crowd, and the poetic character of his descriptions is unmistakable. His style flows on with the ease of an epic recitation, his sentences hang together loosely; poet-like he sees around him the audience which he desires to enchant and thrill with the charm of his story. Even in philosophy no attempt was made to reproduce the sequence of ideas in clear and exact terms. The teachings of Heraclitus bore the character of Sibylline oracles; he delighted in figurative language which suggested rather than followed up an idea, and apart from the abstruseness of his thought the construction of his sentences was so far from plain that it was impossible to determine precisely the grammatical sequence of his discourse.

Thus, great as was the wealth of Ionian literature, it had as yet no prose, while other parts of the country were even more backward. Generally speaking, we may say that the distinction between poetry and prose as two separate forms of literature was not recognised by the Greeks till late. We need only recall the hymns of Pindar to see how phrases and ideas of an entirely prosaic order occur side by side with the loftiest flights of poetic imagery. It was reserved for Athenian literature to create a prose style. The language was sufficiently new and supple to take and reproduce the peculiar impress of the Attic spirit; and this, as compared with the Ionic spirit, manifests itself in language, as in garb and manners, by greater simplicity and smoothness of form.

The dialect spoken in Attica occupied a sort of intermediate position among the dialects of the various tribes of Greece, and was therefore admirably fitted to become the medium of communication among all educated Greeks. For, although closely akin to Ionic, the Attic dialect had remained free from many Ionic peculiarities developed in the islands and on the further coast--particularly from the tendency to soften the vowel sounds.

Side by side with the eloquence which subserved political ends and was designed to guide the masses, there developed in Athens the speech of the law courts, which from the outset was more strictly in accordance with regular rules and bore more likeness to a literary exercise, by reason of the rise of a class of writers who composed pleas for others. For it was the law in Attica that every man must conduct his own case, so that even those who had their speeches composed by counsel were themselves obliged to deliver them. Accordingly the personality of the orator, which carried such weight in political speeches, fell completely into the background; he was a mere writer of orations (logographos), and dealt with public instead of private affairs. This kind of oratory entered into much closer relations with sophistry, because the latter aimed at giving the mind such versatility as would enable it to handle with skill any subject presented to it and to discover in each the greatest variety of interesting matter.

A peculiar kind of public oration which attained to importance in the Athens of Pericles was the speech in honour of citizens who had fallen in battle. By a special statute which dates from the time of Cimon, a speech of this character was associated with a public funeral; and it was the custom to commission the most approved orator of the day to deliver this funeral oration in the name of the community, as an honourable distinction and acknowledgment of the public services of the deceased. Wordy and elaborate eulogiums did not suit the taste of the time. At such moments, when the citizens felt themselves smitten with grievous loss, it seemed a worthier task to bid them take courage, to turn their mourning into thanksgiving, their sorrow into joy and pride, by holding up before them the lofty interests of the public service for which their fellow citizens had laid down their lives, and to encourage the hearers to the same joyful self sacrifice.

Considering that all the arts and sciences flourished most vigorously during the period of the Persian wars, the fruits of which came to maturity in the years of peace under Pericles, it may well surprise us that the lyric art, the very one which is wont to be most closely associated with every spiritual movement, did not keep pace with the development of the other arts; and that the Wars of Liberation, so national, so just, and crowned, after grievous trials, with such amazing success, found no fuller echo in popular minstrelsy. Various circumstances combine to explain the fact.

The home of Æolian lyric poetry was more remote from the agitations of the times, and the inspiration which had called forth the poems of Alcæus and Sappho a hundred years before had burnt low. Choral lyric poetry, on the other hand, was too completely interwoven with religious worship and earlier conditions of life, it was too much accustomed to put its art at the service of the old families whose glories belonged to the past rather than the present, to find itself at home in these changed times. The Theban bard, in particular, was too deeply concerned for his native city--which had reaped nothing but shame and misery from the Wars of Liberation--and for Delphi--which had from the first looked with disfavour on the national aspirations after liberty--to appreciate dispassionately the glories of the new era, though he was too large hearted and liberal minded to refuse the victorious city of Athens its meed of admiration and praise in song. The Thebans punished Pindar for calling Athens “the pillar of Hellas”; the Athenians rewarded him, rightly esteeming his tribute a triumph of the good cause. In Sparta nothing was done to celebrate the Wars of Liberation. The Spartan constitution allowed no freedom of intellectual life, and furnished too little in the way of comfort and contentment to prove a favourable soil for poetry.

In the elegy, the oldest form of Greek lyric--so perfect an expression of the Ionic spirit in its varied measures and uses--a new form had been evolved in Ionia itself, side by side with the older one in which Theognis had expounded his party rancour and Solon his statesman-like wisdom--a lighter form which touched upon life in accents untinged by grief, the song of joyous conviviality, giving the gaiety of the banquet a higher consecration by the introduction of ethical ideas. “To drink, to jest, to bear a just mind,” sang Ion, and brought public affairs gracefully into the conversation. Dionysius the Athenian, a statesman of note in the age of Pericles, associated himself with Ion in this form of verse, and the lighter kind of elegy so appealed to the intellectual character of contemporary Athens that even Sophocles and Æschylus composed elegies of this sort. The fifth century was so rich in life and movement that these occasional verses were produced in great abundance; the epigram itself is no more than a subsidiary kind of elegiac verse. Its concise form was due to its original purpose, which was to serve as an inscription on some public monument, and it is therefore more closely connected with the great events of the time than any other kind of poetry. Simonides of Ceos was esteemed above all other Greeks as a writer of occasional verse in the best sense of the term, so much so that Sparta commissioned the Ionian poet to sing the praise of her Leonidas. With inimitable felicity he immortalised the events of the Wars of Liberation in brief pregnant epigrams inscribed on monuments of every sort, sang the praises of the fallen in elegies, and celebrated the days of Artemisium and Marathon in grand cantatas which were performed by festal choirs.

The state did what it could to advance the cause of art. It offered poets brilliant opportunities for distinguishing themselves at the celebrations held in honour of its victories, and gave prizes for the best performances. As Themistocles had been assisted by Simonides, so Cimon was assisted by the genius of Ion, who in like manner laboured to hand down his fame to posterity. Pericles was led by his own tastes as well as by political considerations to do all that lay in his power to foster the art of song in Athens. For this purpose he introduced the musical competitions at the Panathenæa, and so summoned all men of talent to vie publicly one with another. He himself was the organiser and lawgiver in this department, and settled with profound artistic knowledge the manner in which the singers and cithara-players should appear at the festivals. If in spite of all these efforts lyric poetry did not take the place we might have anticipated in the Athens of Pericles, and Simonides found no worthy successors, the principal reason must be sought in the fact that another stronger and richer voice of poetry arose, into which the lyric was merged and so lost its individual importance.

Of all kinds of lyric poetry none was cultivated in Athens so admirably and successfully as the dithyrambus, the chant in praise of the god Dionysus, the giver of blessings--the branch of religious poetry which showed a capacity for development beyond all others. Lasus of Hermione, the tutor of Pindar, had changed this form of song (originally no more than the medium of an enthusiastic nature worship) into an artistically constructed choral chant and invested it with such splendour by bold and varied measures and the rippling music of flutes, as to cast the fame of Arion, its original inventor, into the shade. From the Peloponnesus Lasus brought the new art to the court of the Pisistratidæ at Athens. At that time everything connected with the worship of Dionysus was regarded with special favour, the dithyrambus was introduced into state festivals, and wealthy citizens vied with one another in equipping and training Bacchic choirs, composed of fifty singers who danced circling the flaming altars of Dionysus; and no expense was spared to procure new songs for the Attic Dionysia from the greatest masters, such as Pindar and Simonides. The latter could boast that he had won no less than fifty dithyrambic victories at Athens. But the evolution of the dithyrambus did not stop there.

The dithyrambus not only included every metre and rhythm known to earlier kinds of lyric poetry, but it contained elements which tended to pass beyond the limitations of the lyric. For the festal chorus regarded the god whose praises they, sang as an immanent presence and, as it were, lived through all that befell him, whether of persecution or victory; and it was therefore but a short step to pass beyond the assumption that their audience was acquainted with the events which formed the subject of their chants, and to call them to mind by narration or set them forth by spectacular representation. The leaders of the dithyrambic chorus accordingly interspersed their singing with recitations, and thus epic and song were combined. The epic recitation was then rendered more effective by the aid of action and costume, the god himself was made visible in his suffering and triumph, the leader of the chorus undertook the part, the dancers were transformed into satyrs--attendants of the god and partakers of his fortunes; and thus from the union of the old forms of poetry there sprang a new form, the drama, the richest and most perfect of all.

The Greeks were by nature gifted with dramatic talent. Their natural vivacity induced them to clothe every doubt or deliberation in the form of a dialogue. Thus even in Homer we find the germ of the drama, which now reaped the benefit of the entire evolution of the older art methods. For all that dance and song had invented in the way of balanced rhythm, effective metre, and poetic imagery, was here united, enlivened by the art of mimicry, which made the person of the actor the instrument of artistic exposition, and warmed by the joyous fires of the Bacchic festival.

The cycle of representation could not but be limited so long as the action was confined by ceremonial considerations to the subjects offered by the worship of Bacchus. The Greeks therefore went a step farther and in place of the fortunes of Bacchus took other subjects equally well calculated to arouse lively sympathy, and thus (when this form of art had been invented) there flowed in an abundance of materials and fertile themes, the storehouse of Homeric and post-Homeric epos was flung open, the national heroes were introduced to the nation in a novel and striking guise, and a vast field of activity was opened to dramatic art.

This advance had already been made beyond the borders of Attica; for before the time of Clisthenes the hero Adrastus had been substituted for Dionysus, and it may be that a similar enlargement of the scope of dithyrambic poetry had also taken place at Corinth. But it was at Athens alone that these rudiments of the drama reached their full development. As the epic had mirrored the heroic days of old, as the lyric kept pace with the development of the nation for three centuries after the decline of the epic, so the drama was the form of poetry which began to flower at the moment when Athens became the pivot of Greek history. Originating from humble beginnings in the time of Solon, it grew in magnitude and importance with the growth of the city’s greatness, and is associated with the history of Athens in every stage of its development.

TRAGEDY

Thespis was the founder of Attic tragedy, for it was he who introduced the alternation of recitation and song and arranged the stage and costumes. The story goes that Solon had small liking for the new art, believing the violent excitement of the emotions by the representation of imaginary events to be prejudicial, but that the tyrants favoured this popular diversion, like everything else connected with the democratic worship of Dionysus, because it suited the purpose of their policy to provide brilliant entertainments for the population at the expense of wealthy citizens. About 550 B.C. they summoned the chorus leader from Icaria to the city, competitions between rival tragic choruses were introduced, and the stage near the black poplar in the market place became a centre of Attic festivity.

With the restoration of peace all civic festivals took a higher flight, the various constituents fell apart, tragedy rejected the baser elements of Bacchic festivity and assumed greater dignity, it was cast into definite artistic forms by Pratinas and Chœrilus, and became freer and freer in its choice of subject. The old element was not abandoned for all that, the rustic youth would not be deprived of their accustomed masquerade, and the people were left their satyr choruses. But the two forms, which could not be combined without mutual detriment, were separated, and thus the satyr drama grows up side by side with tragedy. Pratinas, who migrated to Athens from Phlius, gave these plays their typical form, and they retained their original character of Bacchic jollity, their rustic and homely features, and the merry rout of the satyrs with their wild dances and rude jests. Thus these elements were preserved to literature and yet prevented from molesting or hampering the further development of tragedy.

The period in which Athens took her place as a great power and sent her triremes across the sea to support the Ionian revolt, likewise constituted an epoch in the history of Attic tragedy. About that time the wooden scaffoldings from which the audience had looked on at the plays of Pratinas, Chœrilus, Phrynichus, and the youthful Æschylus, gave way; and the drama had already attained such consequence in Athens that the building of a magnificent theatre was taken in hand. A permanent stage of stone was built within the precincts sacred to Dionysus on the southern declivity of the citadel, and seats for spectators, rising one above the other in semi-circular rows, were built into the rock of the Acropolis in such wise that the audience commanded a view of Hymettus and the Ilissus on the left and of the harbour on the right.

Meanwhile the artistic structure of tragedy was steadily advancing towards perfection. The subject-matter grew more varied, music and the dance were used in a greater variety of forms, female characters were added. Nevertheless the lyric element remained predominant down to the time of the Persian wars; and Phrynichus, the greatest predecessor of Æschylus, was most admired for his charming choral songs. It was with the great drama of the War of Liberation that the theatrical drama began to unfold its full powers, and nowhere do we perceive more clearly the manifestation of the newly-acquired energy which pervaded every department of Attic life.

The man destined to give utterance in tragic art to the spirit of the great age was Æschylus, the son of Euphorion of Eleusis, a scion of an ancient family, through which he claimed association with one of the most venerable sanctuaries of the land. This is why he calls himself the pupil of Demeter, thus testifying that the solemn services of the temple at Eleusis had not failed to exercise a lasting influence upon his mind. As a boy he witnessed the fall of the tyrants: when come to man’s estate he fought at Marathon, being then thirty-five years old, and he himself declared, in the inscription on his tombstone, that he took pride, not in his tragedies, but in his share in that great day, though there he had been but a citizen among citizens, while as a poet he was without peer among his contemporaries. For it was he whose creative genius laid the foundations of Attic tragedy, making all previous achievements look like imperfect attempts.

He introduced a second actor on the stage, and thus made the play a real drama, by which means lively colloquy first became possible. Dialogue, for which the Athenians were singularly well qualified by their love of talking, readiness and acute reasoning faculty, was thus transferred to the stage, and this gave it a wholly novel interest. The language of the dialogue was in the main that of ordinary life, while older phonetic principles prevailed in the chorus, which was thus less familiar to the ear and produced an impression of solemnity and dignity which suited well with its character of the oldest element of tragedy and the religious centre about which it had crystallised. The choruses were shortened to allow the action to proceed more vigorously, the characters of the dramatis personæ were more sharply defined, a distinction was made between leading and secondary parts, and the parts of secondary characters of lower station bore the stamp of the common people, as distinguished from the heroic figures of the play. The stage itself was brought to a higher pitch of perfection. It was effectively fitted up as an ideal scene by Agatharchus, the son of Eudemus, an artist from Samos, who cultivated scene painting scientifically as a branch of art, and mechanism was pressed into the service to raise shades from the depths of the earth or cause gods to hover in the air by artificial means. The spectacle as a whole gained in solemn dignity no less than in spiritual import and moral significance.

The principal aim of the earlier poets had been to express and induce emotional moods; but the object of the drama was to present the legends of olden times completely in their general connection, and for this purpose Attic drama was so arranged that three tragedies were joined to form a single whole, in order to display upon a harmonious plan the successive developments of the mythical story, and these three tragedies, which were so many acts of one great drama, were followed by a Satyr-drama as afterpiece. This led back from the affecting solemnity of the tragedies to the popular sphere of the Dionysian festival, where the diverting adventures witnessed and enacted by the satyrs restored the minds of the spectators to innocent mirth. It was a healthy trait of popular sentiment which thus mingled jest and earnest, and one of which we see other evidences in vase painting and the sculptures of the temples.

Such was the tetralogy of Attic drama, which, if not invented by Æschylus yet received its artistic consummation at his hands. The dithyrambic chorus was divided into groups, each consisting of twelve (and later of fifteen) persons, so that there was a special chorus for each part of the tetralogy, to follow sympathetically the action of the dramatis personæ and fill up the pauses with dance and song. The orchestra, where the chorus was placed, lay between the stage and the spectators, just as the chorus itself symbolically occupied an intermediate position between the audience and the heroes of the drama.

The Greeks were accustomed to look upon the poets as their teachers, and no man could gain recognition as a poet among them who had only talent, imagination, and artistic skill to show as proofs of his poetic vocation; this required a thorough education of heart and mind and clear insight into things human and divine. Hence the calling of a poet laid claim to the whole man and the man’s whole life, and none conceived of it more nobly than Æschylus. Like Pindar he takes his hearers into the very heart of the myth, drawing out its moral earnestness and illuminating it with the light of historical experience. Humanity, as represented by Æschylus in the Titan Prometheus, with its constancy through struggles and misery, its proud self-respect, its indefatigable inventive genius, with its tendency, too, to rashness and arrogant boasting, is the generation of his own contemporaries, with their reckless aspirations; but no wisdom avails man save that which comes from Zeus, no skill and intelligence save that which is based on devout morality. Thus, without petty premeditation the poet becomes a true teacher of the people; in an age of incipient scepticism he endeavours to uphold the religion of his forefathers, to purify popular conceptions and to draw forth the kernel of wholesome truth from the many-hued tinsel of popular fables. It was the mission of the poet to maintain harmony between popular tradition and advancing knowledge.

But the poets lived in the midstream of civic life, and it is not to be supposed that, in a city like Athens, men who at public festivals set forth the creations of their genius in the public eye, could remain indifferent to the questions of their own day. They were obliged of necessity to belong to one party or another, and if they were sincere and candid, their views as to what was for the good of the commonwealth could not but appear in their works. Their choice of subject was still limited in the main to mythology; man’s strength of will, his deeds and sufferings, the contradiction between laws human and divine, were still set forth by preference in the characters of the Homeric age of which the tradition survived in the epos. These were the prototypes of the human race, their sufferings were the sufferings and entanglements incident to the whole human race; in contemplating them the spectators were to be freed from what was personal in their sorrows and cares, the narrow bounds of their self-consciousness were to be widened, and they were to receive from the performance not only the highest artistic pleasure, but a cheering and healing purification of their hearts. These heroes of olden times were in harmony with the ideal character which the dramatists were bent on giving to the whole world of the stage; but the impression was none the less striking because the audience was transported into a dim and legendary past. We feel the spirit of the warrior of Marathon in the warlike plays of Æschylus, and the spectator of his Seven against Thebes glowed with eagerness to strike a blow for his country.

Meanwhile Phrynichus had ventured to put modern events on the stage, and his Fall of Miletus and Phœnissæ were no doubt fraught with political intention. Æschylus followed the example of his predecessor in a far grander style when, four years after the production of the Phœnissæ of Phrynichus, he produced his drama of the Persæ. He depicted the fall of the Great King. But with fine artistic instinct he chose Persia, not Attica, for the scene of his tragedy. He brings before our eyes the consequences of the battle, its reaction upon the hostile empire, in its own capital. Darius is conjured from the grave that in the person of the pious and prudent ruler may be set forth the glory of the inviolate Persian empire, while his successor returns from Hellas shorn of all dignity, a warning example of the ruin which foolish arrogance brings upon all sovereign power. The whole composition is pervaded by the idea of retribution, which had been awakened in the Greek mind by the Persian wars.

In the tragedy of Phrynichus, Themistocles is extolled above all other men, while Æschylus only alludes to him in passing as the inventor of a subtle stratagem. On the other hand the latter gives a detailed account of the fight on Psyttalea, so exalting the fame of Aristides, who contributed substantially to the victory of Salamis, not by sea, but by land.

The Persæ was the middle play of a trilogy and comes to no final conclusion. The shade of Darius hints at other defeats in the future, and at the struggles of Platæa. From Glaucus, the third play of the trilogy, an allusion to Himera has been preserved. The first part, Phineus, takes its name from the mythical seer who revealed to the Argonauts their coming voyage to the land of the northern barbarians. Hence, it is extremely probable that all three plays were linked together by a single idea, the idea (present to all thinking men of the time) of the great struggle between barbarian and Greek, between Asia and Europe, which had its mythical prelude in the voyage of the Argonauts, and came to its glorious issue on the battlefields of Greece and Sicily. In like manner Herodotus had conceived of the Persian War as one link in a great chain of historical development, and Pindar had associated Salamis, Platæa, and Himera as ranking equally among the glorious days of the Greeks; and we may be sure that the trilogy of the Persæ would not have been acted at the court of Hiero unless it had fully satisfied the tyrant’s love of praise.

Æschylus represented the legendary history of the house of Pelops in the three plays of the Oresteia, and that of the royal house of Thebes and the Thracian king, Lycurgus, each in a cycle of three dramas; he worked up the legend of Prometheus so that the conflicts and discords of the several parts find a satisfactory solution in a larger order of things; and thus the poet wove legend and history into a single piece. Prehistoric and present times, East and West, the mother-country and the colonies, all form parts of a grand picture, of a chain of events linked together by prophecy and reciprocal reaction. The poet looks forward and backward, and prophet-like interprets the course of history, seeing the inner necessity revealed to the eye of the spirit. He uplifts the hearts of his people by setting forth the waxing power of the Greeks, the waning might of the barbarians on every side, without a taint of scorn or malicious triumph to vitiate the moral majesty of his work. At the same time he moderates the pride of victory, by pointing to the guilt which brought about the Persian overthrow and to the eternal laws of divine justice, the observance of which is the inexorable condition of the prosperity of the Greeks.

In the tragedies on mythical subjects there was no lack of passages which permitted of or actually challenged application to the events of the day. Next to Aristides, it was Cimon to whom the muse of Æschylus did homage. Like Cimon, the poet was the champion of a common Hellenism, of patriarchal customs, the rule of the best, the discipline of the good old times, and so when the waves of popular agitation rose higher and higher till they threatened the very Areopagus, the last bulwark, the septuagenarian poet led his muse into the strife of conflicting parties and exerted his utmost powers to impress upon his fellow-citizens the sacred dignity of the Areopagus as a divine institution and to warn them of the consequences of sinful license. The Eumenides of Æschylus is a brilliant example of the way in which a great imaginative work may be made to serve a special purpose and express a particular tendency without losing anything of its transparent lucidity or of the sublimity which stamps it as a masterpiece for all time. But though the Areopagus remained unmolested as a court of justice (and we should like to fancy the poem of Æschylus an influential factor in the matter) the poet felt alien and solitary in the city where democracy had completely gained the ascendant. This was not the freedom for which he had bled in the field; the band of those who had fought in the Wars of Liberation dwindled and dwindled; the Oresteia was the last work he produced in Athens; and he died in his seventieth year at Gela in Sicily (456 B.C.), after a residence there of about two years.

The day of the warriors of Marathon was past, and the new age, the age of Pericles, found exponents in a younger generation, and on the Attic stage in Sophocles. Like Æschylus he was of noble birth, as is indicated by his appointment to be a priest of the hero, Halon, but his father was a craftsman and the head of a great smithy for the manufacture of weapons. He was born in the metalliferous district of Colonus about B.C. 496 and grew up amidst the delightful rural scenery of the valley of the Cephisus, in the shade of the sacred olives that had witnessed the first beginnings of national history, yet near the capital and near the sea, which he overlooked from the crags of Colonus, and where he saw the port grow up during his boyhood years. In the early bloom of youthful beauty he led the dance at the festival held in honour of the victory of Salamis; twelve years later he entered the lists as a rival of the great poet Æschylus, whose inspiring art had attracted him to follow the same path to poetic fame. It was a day of unwonted excitement throughout Athens when all men awaited the issue of the contest between the ambitious young poet and Æschylus, then close upon sixty years of age and twice already the wearer of the laurel crown. The occasion was the same Dionysian festival on which Cimon, having brought the Thracian campaign to a glorious close, came up from the Piræus and offered his thank-offerings to the gods in the orchestra of the theatre. The people were in raptures over the relics of Theseus which he had brought back, and amidst the assenting acclamations of the assembled citizens the archon Apsephion appointed Cimon and his fellow-generals umpires, as being the worthiest representatives of the ten tribes. The result was that the prize was awarded to the Triptolemus trilogy of Sophocles.

There was no opposition between the art of Sophocles and that of his predecessor. The former looked up reverentially to the man whose original genius had led the way to the consummation of tragic art. Envy and jealousy were foreign to his lovable disposition. But he was an independent-minded pupil of his great master, and a man of very different endowments. His genius was gentler, simpler, and more tranquil, the extremes of pathos and pomp were repugnant to his taste. Accordingly he toned down the force of the theatrical diction which Æschylus had introduced, and, without degrading his characters to the common level, tried to make them more human, so that the spectators could feel more closely akin to them. This method is intimately connected with the altered treatment of the subjects of tragedy. In the treatment of tragic legend Æschylus reached the greatest heights to which the genius of Greece ever soared; in this sphere no man could surpass him. But Sophocles realised that the legends could not always be presented to the people with the same breadth of handling without their interest being gradually exhausted. It was therefore necessary to develop more vital action within the various tragedies, to conceive the characters more definitely, and excite a more vivid psychological interest.

Æschylus had already treated the trilogy in such a manner that it was not bound to the thread of a single myth, and the combination, if not dissolved by Sophocles, was so far loosened as to make each tragedy of the three complete in itself, leading up to its appropriate close within the limits of the action and capable of being judged as a separate composition. The result was much greater freedom, the motive of each play could be treated in fuller detail and the poetic picture enhanced by the prominence given to secondary characters. Thus, in his treatment of the legend of Orestes, Sophocles suffers the act of matricide and its perpetrator to fall into the background and gives quite a new turn to the familiar subject by making Electra the leading character in place of her brother Orestes, showing the whole course of the action as reflected in her spirit, and thus securing an opportunity of creating a study of varied emotion and a type of womanly heroism to which the picture of her sister’s dissimilar temperament serves as an admirable foil.

In order to take full advantage of the resources of a more refined and advanced style of art, Sophocles introduced a third actor on the stage and thus opened the way to incomparably greater vividness of treatment no less than to much greater variety of colouring and grouping in the dramatis personæ. Moreover, Sophocles, though an adept in the song and dance, was the first poet to abandon the practice of appearing in the parts he had created. From that time the professions of poet and actor were distinct, and the art of the latter acquired greater independent value. A less active part, outside the scope of the action, was assigned to the chorus, and the dramatic element became more significantly prominent as the nucleus of the tragedy. Æschylus himself recognised the advance, for he not only adopted the improvements in the outward setting of tragedy thus effected, but spurred on by his younger rival, rose to the height of a maturer art in his dramas.

To the influence of Sophocles was due the increased fondness for Attic subjects; his Triptolemus extolled Attica as the home of a superior civilisation, which spread victoriously from that centre to distant lands, he brings the legend of Œdipus to an harmonious close on Attic soil, at Colonus, his own birth-place, and even in the Electra he manifests the Athenian point of view by taking the overthrow of unlawful dominion and the successful struggle for liberty as the purpose of the action.

His tragedies contributed more than any other works to give spiritual significance, as Pericles strove to do, to the age of Athenian might and splendour. Like Pericles, Sophocles endeavoured to maintain the ascendency of the ancient worship and customs of the country, the unwritten precepts of sacred law, while at the same time mastering every step of intellectual progress and every enlargement of the bounds of knowledge. His diction bears the stamp of a trained and powerful intellect, which often carries terseness to the verge of obscurity; but with what skill does he preserve the charm of graceful expression, what a spirit of felicitous harmony pervades all his works! He was a man after Pericles’ own heart, and his personal intimacy with the latter is proved by the gay and unaffected manner in which the statesman treats the poet as his colleague in the camp. Sophocles was never a partisan or party writer in the same sense as Æschylus, and as Phrynichus seems to have been, but his art was a mirror of the noblest tendencies of the time, a glorified version of the Athens of Pericles. We meet with his clear and sound judgment on civil affairs in every passage in which he praises prudent counsel as the safeguard of states, and the Attic people rightly appreciated him as the true poet of his age, for none ever won so many prizes or enjoyed his fame so unmolested as Sophocles, nor could Euripides (who though only fifteen or sixteen years his junior belonged to a totally different era) gain any success as his rival until the age of Pericles was past. And even to him Sophocles was never obliged to yield the palm.

COMEDY

Side by side with tragedy, and from the same germ, i.e., from the Bacchic festivities, comedy developed. It is full sister to tragedy, but grew up longer in rustic freedom and fell much later under the discipline and training of the city; and for that reason it retained more faithfully the character of its source. For its origin was the jollity of the vintage, the merry-making of country folk over the increase of another year, which is found in all wine-growing districts. Swarms of masked holiday-makers sang the praises of the genial god and in tipsy merriment played all kinds of jokes and tricks on every one who met the procession and gave an opening for pranks and raillery, the events of the day were freely exploited, and he who hit upon the merriest quips was rewarded by the hearty laughter and applause of a grateful audience.

Thus the autumnal festival was kept in Attica in its day, and more particularly in the district of Icaria, not far from Marathon. The worship of Dionysus as there celebrated made it in a manner the nursery of the whole body of Athenian drama, for Thespis came from Icaria. Thither, too, came Susarion of Megara, bringing from his native place the rude wit of Megarian farce and setting the fashion which remained in vogue for the time in Attica. From his school arose Mæson, who was very popular in the time of the Pisistratidæ. The next step was the transference of the rustic stage to the capital, where it was recognised by the government as a part of the Dionysian festival and supported out of the public funds. This took place in the time of Cimon, after the Persian wars, and the energetic temper which at that time pervaded the life of Athens proved its vigour by transforming the rude, half-foreign farce into a well-organised form of art, full of significance and thoroughly Attic in character, of which we must regard Chionides and Magnes of Icaria as the founders.

When once the Icarian drama was naturalised in the home of tragedy many of the concomitants of the tragic drama were transferred to it, public contests in comedy were instituted by the state, prizes were adjudicated and awarded, and the cost of the chorus was defrayed from the public funds; moreover it was similarly arranged in such matters as the stage, the dialogue, the chorus, and the number of actors, without, however, forfeiting its peculiar characteristics. For tragedy carried the spectators into a loftier sphere, and strove by every means at her command to present figures and conditions on a grander scale than that of ordinary life, while comedy maintained the closest relations with contemporary and common life. It remained more unaffected in dance, versification, and diction no less than in poetic design; nay, to such an extent did it retain its topical character and its adaptation to the events of the hour that the poet used the choir to interrupt the course of the action entirely in order to discuss his personal affairs or the burning questions of the time with the audience in lengthy parabases.

This kind of dramatic composition could only flourish in a democratic atmosphere, and it was associated with the democracy in every stage of its development. Occupied from the outset with the preposterous and ridiculous side of life, it castigated all follies, defects, and weaknesses, and amidst the variety and publicity of the civic life of Athens it could never lack either subjects for mirth or a witty, ingenious, and laughter-loving audience ready to catch at every allusion. But it also served the purpose of bringing abuses and contradictions in public life to light. This was the serious side of its calling, for unless inspired by a serious and patriotic temper its humour would have grown dull, ineffective, and contemptible. The aim of the comic poets was to be not mere frivolous provokers of mirth, but teachers of men, and leaders of the people, even as the tragic poets were; and in an age of feverish excitement the severest of their censures were directed against new-fangled ways. Comedy was aristocratic in character, it championed native custom against foreign ways, it ruthlessly denounced every evil tendency in life and art, and every instance of misconduct or abuse of power. It cherished the memory of the heroes of the Wars of Liberation and encouraged others to emulate their example, and it was fond of subjects which had some bearing on important contemporary events, as we see in the Thracian Women of Cratinus, which was associated with the establishment of colonies in Thrace.

The founders of comedy as an Attic art are Crates and Cratinus. Cratinus was slightly younger than Æschylus, and like him was endowed with original creative genius, but his taste for unrestrained freedom and his inexhaustible fund of humour marked him out as a born comic poet, while his rude veracity qualified him to make comedy a power in the state. It became so about the time that Pericles came into power, and though Cratinus was not the sort of man to commit himself unreservedly to one or other of the contesting parties, we know that in his Archilochi (a comedy in which the chorus was composed of scoffers like Archilochus) he brought an Attic citizen upon the stage immediately after the death of Cimon and put in his mouth a lament for “the divine man,” “the most hospitable, the best of all Panhellenes, with whom he had hoped to spend a serene old age--but now he had passed away before him.” The mighty Cratinus was succeeded by Aristophanes and Eupolis, both unmistakably akin to him in mind and feeling, but gentler, more moderate, and stricter in their adherence to the rules of art. But Aristophanes alone combined with these qualities a wealth of creative invention in nothing inferior to the genius of Cratinus.

THE GLORY OF ATHENS

All these men,--philosophers and historians, orators and poets,--each one of whom marks an epoch in the development of art and science, were not merely contemporaries, but lived together in the same city, some born there and nourished from their youth on the glories of their native place, others attracted thither by the same glory; nor was their association merely local, they laboured, consciously or unconsciously, at a common task. For whether they were personally intimate or not with the great statesman who was the centre of the Attic world, nay, even if they were numbered among his opponents, they could not but render him substantial help in his life-work of making Athens the intellectual capital of Greece.

Here whatever germs of culture were introduced from foreign parts gained new life, the Ionian study of countries and peoples became history as soon as Herodotus came into touch with Athens; the Peloponnesian dithyrambus grew into tragedy at Athens, the farce of Megara into Attic comedy; here the philosophy of Ionia and Magna Græcia met to supplement each other’s defects and prepare the way for the development of Attic philosophy; even sophistry was nowhere turned to such account as at Athens. In earlier times every district, city, and island had had its peculiar school and tendencies, but now all vigorous intellectual movements crowded together at Athens; local and tribal peculiarities of temperament and dialect were reconciled; and as the drama (the most Attic of all the arts) absorbed all art-methods into itself, to reproduce them in organic harmony, so from all the achievements of the genius of Greece there grew a general culture which was at once the heritage of Attica and of the Greek nation. Vehemently as other states might oppose the political predominance of Athens, none could deny that the city where Æschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Zeno, Anaxagoras, Protagoras, Crates, and Cratinus all laboured together, was the focus of all lofty aspirations, the heart of the nation, Hellas in Hellas.

Slight as is our knowledge of the personal relations of these great contemporaries, there are a few traditions from which we can gather some idea of the intercourse of Pericles with the most eminent among them and of their intercourse with one another. We know that Pericles equipped the chorus for a theatrical performance in which Æschylus carried off the prize. We know of the friendship of Herodotus and Sophocles, and we actually possess the beginning of some occasional verses addressed to Herodotus by the poet, then in the fifty-fifth year of his age; a letter in elegiac metre dating from the time when the historian migrated to Thurii, and withdrew from the delightful society of the best men of Athens. Sophocles was before all things sociable, and we hear that he formed a circle of men skilled in the fine arts and dedicated it to the Muses, and that it held regular meetings. This reciprocal stimulus resulted in a steady advance in all directions. In every branch of art we can trace the epochs of development as surely as in the structure of the trimetre of the drama. But as, generally speaking, Greek art owed its unfaltering progress to the fact that the younger artists did not endeavour to gain a start by rash attempts at originality, but held fast the good in all things and readily adopted and perfected methods that had once gained acceptance, so in Athens we see the elder masters gratefully praised and honoured by their pupils, like Æschylus by Sophocles and Cratinus by Aristophanes.

It is one of the most notable characteristics of the intellectual life of Athens that her eminent men, however high a view they took of their own calling, did not owe their pre-eminence in it to any narrow-minded restriction of their interest to their own peculiar sphere. This versatility was rendered possible by the vitality for which the contemporaries of Pericles were remarkable, and it seems as though the brilliant prime of the Greek nation manifested itself most plainly in the frequent combination of extraordinary mental and physical powers. We cannot but admire the men who retained their vital force unimpaired to extreme old age and advanced in the practice of their art to the last.

Sophocles, after having composed 113 dramas, is said to have read the chorus of the Œdipus at Colonus aloud, to disprove the rumour that he was incapable of managing his own affairs by reason of the infirmities of old age. Cratinus was ninety-one when he produced Dame Bottle, the saucy comedy with which he defeated Aristophanes, who had looked upon him as a rival whose day was over. Simonides, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno, were likewise examples of healthy and vigorous old age. Timocreon combined the skill of an athlete with the profession of a poet. Polus, Sophocles’ favourite actor, was competent to take the leading part in eight tragedies in four days. Lastly, the sterling capacity and versatility of the masters of those days is shown by the fact that though extraordinarily prolific authors of imaginative works, they spared time to strive after scientific certainty concerning the problems and resources of their art, and combined absolute self-possession and the love of theoretical study with the enthusiasm of the artist temperament. Thus Lasus, the inventor of the perfected form of the dithyrambus, was at the same time an accomplished critic and one of the first writers on the theory of music; and Sophocles himself wrote a treatise on the tragic chorus, to set forth his views as to its place and purpose in tragedy. In like manner the most distinguished architects wrote scientific treatises on the principles of their art, Polyclitus worked out the theory of numbers which lies at the root of plastic symmetry, and Agatharchus the principles of optics, according to which he had arranged the decoration of the stage. In so doing he took the first step towards the teaching of perspective, which was subsequently developed by Democritus and Anaxagoras.[b]

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