Part 53

"We have [in the accompanying figure] the ground-plan of the residence of this Athenian citizen. The entrance x opens on the public road. The site is bounded on either side by narrow streets. This entrance x opens on the court O, which is surrounded by porticos. At A is the porter's lodge, and at B the rooms for the slaves, with kitchen at C and latrines at a. From this first court: in the centre of which is a small fountain with a basin which receives the rain water, the passage D leads into the inner court E; which is larger and is likewise surrounded by porticos. At G is the reception room, at H the strong room for valuables, and at S the private altar. At F is a large storeroom containing provisions and wine; and at I the small dining room (triclinium); the cooking-room for the family being at J with latrines at b. The large triclinium is at K. The passage m admits to the gynæceum, containing the bedrooms P along the portico M, a common room for the women, with its small enclosed garden, and closets at e. The quarters for visitors are entered by the passage t, and consist of bedrooms V, a portico T, a small garden and closets f. At d is an opening into the lane for the servants, when required. The gardens extend in the direction Z. This house is situated on the slopes of the hill which to the south-west looks towards the Acropolis; thus it is sheltered from the violent winds which sometimes blow from this quarter. From the large dining-hall and from the terrace L, which adjoins it, there is a charming prospect; for, above the trees of the garden is seen the city overlooked by the Acropolis, and towards the left the hill of the Areopagus. From this terrace L there is a descent to the garden by about twelve steps. The position was chosen with a view to protection against the sun's heat and the troublesome winds. From the portico of the gynæceum are seen the hills extending towards the north, covered with houses surrounded by olive-trees; and in the background Mount Pentelicus. … In the dwelling of Chremylus the various departments were arranged at the proprietor's discretion, and the architect only conformed to his instructions. Thus the front part of the house is assigned to the external relations of the owner. In this court O assemble the agents or factors who come to give an account of the commissions they have executed, or to receive orders. If the master wishes to speak to any of them, he takes him into his reception room; his bedchamber being at R, he can easily repair to that reception-room or to the gynæceum reserved for the women and younger children. If he entertains friends, they have their separate apartments, which are shut off, not being in communication with the first court except through the passage t. All that part of the habitation which is beyond the wide entrance-hall D is consecrated to domestic life; and only the intimate friends of the family are admitted into the second court; for example, if they are invited to a banquet,—which is held in the great hall K. The master usually takes his meals with his wife and one or two members of his family who live in the house, in the smaller room I, the couches of which will hold six persons; whereas fifteen guests can be accommodated on the couches of the great hall K. Chremylus has spared nothing to render his house one of the most sumptuous in the city. The columns of Pentelican marble support architraves of wood, surmounted by friezes and cornices overlaid with stucco and ornamented with delicate painting. Everywhere the walls are coated with fine smooth plaster, adorned with paintings; and the ceilings are of timber artistically wrought and coloured."

_E. Viollet-le-Duc, The Habitations of Man in all Ages, chapter 17._

{163}

ATHENS: B. C. 445-429. The Age of Pericles: Law and its Administration. Contrast with the Romans.

"It is remarkable … that the 'equality' of laws on which the Greek democracies prided themselves—that equality which, in the beautiful drinking song of Callistratus, Harmodius and Aristogiton are said to have given to Athens—had little in common with the 'equity' of the Romans. The first was an equal administration of civil laws among the citizens, however limited the class of citizens might be; the last implied the applicability of a law, which was not civil law, to a class which did not necessarily consist of citizens. The first excluded a despot; the last included foreigners, and for some purposes slaves. … There are two special dangers to which law, and society which is held together by law, appear to be liable in their infancy. One of them is that law may be too rapidly developed. This occurred with the codes of the more progressive Greek communities, which disembarrassed themselves with astonishing facility from cumbrous forms of procedure and needless terms of art, and soon ceased to attach any superstitious value to rigid rules and prescriptions. It was not for the ultimate advantage of mankind that they did so, though the immediate benefit conferred on their citizens may have been considerable. One of the rarest qualities of national character is the capacity for applying and working out the law, as such, at the cost of constant miscarriages of abstract justice, without at the same time losing the hope or the wish that law may be conformed to a higher ideal. The Greek intellect, with all its nobility and elasticity, was quite unable to confine itself within the strait waistcoat of a legal formula; and, if we may judge them by the popular courts of Athens, of whose working we possess accurate knowledge, the Greek tribunals exhibited the strongest tendency to confound law and fact. The remains of the Orators and the forensic commonplaces preserved by Aristotle in his Treatise on Rhetoric, show that questions of pure law were constantly argued on every consideration which could possibly influence the mind of the judges. No durable system of jurisprudence could be produced in this way. A community which never hesitated to relax rules of written law whenever they stood in the way of an ideally perfect decision on the facts of particular cases, would only, if it bequeathed any body of judicial principles to posterity, bequeath one consisting of the ideas of right and wrong which happened to be prevalent at the time. Such jurisprudence would contain no framework to which the more advanced conceptions of subsequent ages could be fitted. It would amount at best to a philosophy, marked with the imperfections of the civilisation under which it grew up. … The other liability to which the infancy of society is exposed has prevented or arrested the progress of far the greater part of mankind. The rigidity of primitive law, arising chiefly from its earlier association and identification with religion, has chained down the mass of the human race to those views of life and conduct which they entertained at the time when their usages were first consolidated into a systematic form. There were one or two races exempted by a marvellous fate from this calamity, and grafts from these stocks have fertilised a few modern societies; but it is still true that, over the larger part of the world, the perfection of law has always been considered as consisting in adherence to the ground plan supposed to have been marked out by the original legislator. If intellect has in such cases been exercised on jurisprudence, it has uniformly prided itself on the subtle perversity of the conclusions it could build on ancient texts without discoverable departure from their literal tenour. I know no reason why the law of the Romans should be superior to the laws of the Hindoos, unless the theory of Natural Law had given it a type of excellence different from the usual one."

_H. S. Maine, Ancient Law, chapters 3-4._

"But both the Greek and the English trial by jury were at one time the great political safeguard against state oppression and injustice; and, owing to this origin, free nations become so attached to it that they are blind to its defects. And just as Ireland would now benefit beyond conception by the abolition of the jury system, so the secured Athenian (or any other) democracy would have thriven better had its laws been administered by courts of skilled judges. For these large bodies of average citizens, who, by the way, were not like our jurymen, unwilling occupants of the jury-box, but who made it a paid business and an amusement, did not regard the letter of the law. They allowed actions barred by the reasonable limits of time; they allowed arguments totally beside the question, though this too was illegal, for there was no competent judge to draw the line; they allowed hearsay evidence, though that too was against the law; indeed the evidence produced in most of the speeches is of the loosest and poorest kind. Worse than all, there were no proper records kept of their decisions, and witnesses were called in to swear what had been the past decisions of a jury sitting in the same city, and under the same procedure. This is the more remarkable, as there were state archives, in which the decrees of the popular assembly were kept. … There is a most extraordinary speech of Lysias against a man called Nichomachus, who was appointed to transcribe the laws of Solon in four months, but who kept them in his possession for six years, and is accused of having so falsified them as to have substituted himself for Solon. Hence there can have been no recognized duplicate extant, or such a thing could not be attempted. So again, in the Trapeziticus of Isocrates, it is mentioned as a well known fact, that a certain Pythodorus was convicted of tampering with state documents, signed and sealed by the magistrates, and deposited in the Acropolis. All these things meet us in every turn in the court speeches of the Attic orators. We are amazed at seeing relationships proved in will cases by a man coming in and swearing that such a man's father had told him that his brother was married to such a woman, of such a house. We find the most libellous charges brought against opponents on matters totally beside the question at issue, and even formal evidence of general bad character admitted. We find some speakers in consequence treating the jury with a sort of mingled deference and contempt which is amusing. 'On the former trial of this case,' they say, 'my opponent managed to tell you many well devised lies; of course you were deceived, how could it be otherwise, and you made a false decision;' or else, 'You were so puzzled that you got at variance with one another, you voted at sixes and sevens, and by a small majority you came to an absurd decision.' {164} 'But I think you know well,' says Isocrates, 'that the city has often repented so bitterly ere this for decisions made in passion and without evidence, as to desire after no long interval to punish those who misled it, and to wish those who had been calumniated were more than restored to their former prosperity. Keeping these facts before you, you ought not to be hasty in believing the prosecutors, nor to hear the defendants with interruption and ill temper. For it is a shame to have the character of being the gentlest and most humane of the Greeks in other respects, and yet to act contrary to this reputation in the trials which take place here. It is a shame that in other cities, when a human life is at stake, a considerable majority of votes is required for conviction, but that among you those in danger do not even get an equal chance with their false accusers. You swear indeed once a year that you will attend to both plaintiff and defendant, but in the interval only keep your oath so far as to accept whatever the accusers say, but you sometimes will not let those who are trying to refute them utter even a single word. You think those cities uninhabitable, in which citizens are executed without trial, and forget that those who do not give both sides a fair hearing are doing the very same thing.'"

_J. P. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece, chapter 13._

ATHENS: B. C. 445-429. The Age of Pericles: Political life. The democracy.

"The real life of Athens lasted at the most for 200 years: and yet there are moments in which all that we have won by the toils of so many generations seems as if it would be felt to be but a small thing beside a single hour of Periklês. The Democracy of Athens was in truth the noblest fruit of that self-developing power of the Greek mind which worked every possession of the common heritage into some new and more brilliant shape, but which learned nothing, nothing of all that formed its real life and its real glory, from the Barbarians of the outer world. Men tell us that Greece learned this or that mechanical invention from Phœnicia or Egypt or Assyria. Be it so; but stand in the Pnyx; listen to the contending orators; listen to the ambassadors of distant cities; listen to each side as it is fairly hearkened to, and see the matter in hand decided by the peaceful vote of thousands—here at least of a truth is something which Athens did not learn from any Assyrian despot or from any Egyptian priest. And we, children of the common stock, sharers in the common heritage, as we see man, Aryan man, in the full growth of his noblest type, we may feel a thrill as we think that Kleisthenês and Periklês were, after all, men of our own blood—as we think that the institutions which grew up under their hands and the institutions under which we ourselves are living are alike branches sprung from one stock, portions of one inheritance in which Athens and England have an equal right. In the Athenian Democracy we see a popular constitution taking the form which was natural for such a constitution to take when it was able to run its natural course in a common-wealth which consisted only of a single city. Wherever the Assembly really remains, in truth as well as in name, an Assembly of the whole people in their own persons, it must in its own nature be sovereign. It must, in the nature of things, delegate more or less of power to magistrates and generals; but such power will be simply delegated. Their authority will be a mere trust from the sovereign body, and to that sovereign body they will be responsible for its exercise. That is to say, one of the original elements of the State, the King or chief, now represented by the elective magistracy, will lose its independent powers, and will sink into a body who have only to carry out the will of the sovereign Assembly. So with another of the original elements, the Council. This body too loses its independent being; it has no ruling or checking power; it becomes a mere Committee of the Assembly, chosen or appointed by lot to put measures into shape for more easy discussion in the sovereign body. As society becomes more advanced and complicated, the judicial power can no longer be exercised by the Assembly itself, while it would be against every democratic instinct to leave it in the arbitrary power of individual magistrates. Other Committees of the Assembly, Juries on a gigantic scale, with a presiding magistrate as chairman rather than as Judge, are therefore set apart to decide causes and to sit in judgment on offenders. Such is pure Democracy, the government of the whole people and not of a part of it only, as carried out in its full perfection in a single city. It is a form of government which works up the faculties of man to a higher pitch than any other; it is the form of government which gives the freest scope to the inborn genius of the whole community and of every member of it. Its weak point is that it works up the faculties of man to a pitch so high that it can hardly be lasting, that its ordinary life needs an enthusiasm, a devotion too highly strung to be likely to live through many generations. Athens in the days of her glory, the Athens of Periklês, was truly 'the roof and crown of things;' her democracy raised a greater number of human beings to a higher level than any government before or since; it gave freer play than any government before or since to the personal gifts of the foremost of mankind. But against the few years of Athenian glory we must set the long ages of Athenian decline. Against the city where Periklês was General we must set the city where Hadrian was Archon. On the Assemblies of other Grecian cities it is hardly needful to dwell. Our knowledge of their practical working is slight. We have one picture of a debate in the popular Assembly of Sparta, an Assembly none the less popular in its internal constitution because it was the assembly of what, as regarded the excluded classes of the State, was a narrow oligarchy. We see that there, as might be looked for, the chiefs of the State, the Kings, and yet more the Ephors, spoke with a degree of official, as distinguished from personal, authority which fell to the lot of no man in the Assembly of Athens. Periklês reigned supreme, not because he was one of Ten Generals, but because he was Periklês. … In the Ekklêsia which listened to Periklês and Dêmosthenes we feel almost as much at home as in an institution of our own land and our own times. At least we ought to feel at home there; for we have the full materials for calling up the political life of Athens in all its fullness, and within our own times one of the greatest minds of our own or of any age has given its full strength to clear away the mists of error and calumny which so long shrouded the parent state of justice and freedom. {165} Among the contemporaries and countrymen of Mr. Grote it is shame indeed if men fail to see in the great Democracy the first state which taught mankind that the voice of persuasion could be stronger than a despot's will, the first which taught that disputes could be settled by a free debate and a free vote which in other lands could have been decided only by the banishment or massacre of the weaker side. … It must be constantly borne in mind that the true difference between an aristocratic and a democratic government, as those words were understood in the politics of old Greece, lies in this. In the Democracy all citizens, all who enjoy civil rights, enjoy also political rights. In the aristocracy political rights belong to only a part of those who enjoy civil rights. But, in either case, the highest authority of the State is the general Assembly of the whole ruling body, whether that ruling body be the whole people or only a part of it. … The slaves and strangers who were shut out at Athens were, according to Greek ideas, no Athenians; but every Athenian had his place in the sovereign assembly of Athens, while every Corinthian had not his place in the sovereign assembly of Corinth. But the aristocratic and the democratic commonwealth both agreed in placing the final authority of the State in the general Assembly of all who enjoy the highest franchise. … The people, of its own will, placed at its head men of the same class as those who in the earlier state of things had ruled it against its will. Periklês, Nikias, Alkibiadês, were men widely differing in character, widely differing in their relations to the popular government. But all alike were men of ancient birth, who, as men of ancient birth, found their way, almost as a matter of course, to those high places of the State to which Kleôn found his way only by a strange freak of fortune. At Rome we find quite another story. There, no less than at Athens, the moral influence of nobility survived its legal privileges; but, more than this, the legal privileges of the elder nobility were never wholly swept away, and the inherent feeling of respect for illustrious birth called into being a younger nobility by its side. At Athens one stage of reform placed a distinction of wealth instead of a distinction of birth: another stage swept away the distinction of wealth also. But the reform, at each of its stages, was general; it affected all offices alike, save those sacred offices which still remained the special heritage of certain sacred families. … In an aristocratic commonwealth there is no room for Periklês; there is no room for the people that hearkened to Periklês; but in men of the second order, skilful conservative administrators, men able to work the system which they find established, no form of government is so fertile. … But everywhere we learn the same lesson, the inconsistency of commonwealths which boast themselves of their own freedom and exalt themselves at the cost of the freedom of others."

_E. A. Freeman, Comparative Politics, lectures 5-6._