Part 12

From Aristophanes it would appear that it was the mark of a jingo democrat at Athens to sing “the Harmodius” on every possible occasion.

Hippias, as I have said, was expelled by the machinations of the Alcmæonids and the strong arm of Sparta in 510 B.C. It was the Alcmæonid Cleisthenes who was called upon to draw up a new constitution. After emerging from the tyrannical stage all the Greek states developed a republic, either oligarchical or democratic. In the oligarchic type the citizenship was confined to a few hundreds of the richer citizens and the actual government was carried on by a small council of ten or fifteen members. This was the normal type of Greek government. The democracy of Athens was unique. All Greek states had inherited from the earliest times the public meeting in the market-place as one of the rights of citizenship. At Athens eventually all administrative decrees were made at this Assembly, or Ecclesia, without any revision whatsoever, and all adult male citizens could attend and speak if they chose. It amounted to government by mass meeting. It was, of course, an ignorant, fickle, excitable body, especially in conducting a war or a piece of foreign policy. But it was a wonderful instrument of education, and it gave the Athenian citizen that sense of direct participation in the affairs of his state which alone could satisfy the political aspirations of a Greek. Who shall call it a failure because it bungled a war and an empire, if it made Athens the eye of the world for ever and ever? Cleisthenes set up a Council of five hundred members, fifty elected from each of his new ten tribes, but that was only a committee to prepare business for the Assembly. Also there still remained the old patrician council of notables, now chiefly consisting of ex-magistrates, who met upon the Areian Hill and were called the Council of the Areopagus. These had the guardianship of the laws, amounting probably to a veto upon the Assembly’s proceedings, and a general censorship over morals. They were also the highest criminal court for cases of blood-guilt--a solemn and awful tribunal. Consisting of ex-officials, they naturally had great influence over the merely annual magistrates, or _archons_; and, in fact, as we have recently learnt from Aristotle, they managed most things in Athens until after the Persian wars. The chief executive magistrates were still the nine annual _archons_, still chosen by popular election. With his new ten tribes Cleisthenes instituted ten _strategoi_, or generals, to lead them under command of the War Archon. The ten tribes were so grouped as to prevent any recurrence of the local factions which had enabled Peisistratus to rise. And Cleisthenes devised the ingenious system called ostracism, by which any unpopular statesman who had a certain number of votes cast against him was sent into polite and honourable banishment. It was generally the leader of the Opposition who suffered this fate, and such was the intention. Though Greek democracy inevitably developed a party system, it was never recognised. Opposition was considered treachery to the state, as, indeed, it generally was.

Such in general was the constitution under which Athens rose to glory. It was modified, as we shall see, in a democratic direction by Pericles. As yet it can hardly, with its powerful Areopagus and elective magistrates, be called a democracy. But it tends that way, and the course before it is plain. Cleisthenes has lost much of the credit due to him in the process which has assigned superhuman wisdom to Solon. He, with Pericles, is the father of the Athenian democracy.

IONIA

At this time, when the mainland cities of Greece were beginning to revive the old Ægean culture under changed conditions, their kinsmen across the sea on both sides had gone in advance of them in civilisation. Why this was so it is hard to say--impossible, on the old theory that all these great cities from Miletus to Sybaris were merely colonies of Athens or Corinth or poor little Megara. But if it be true that one and the same gifted race had dwelt from Neolithic times on the coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean, then it is quite natural that the cities furthest removed from the main focus of Northern invasion should be the first to recover from the turmoil of the Dark Ages caused by the coming of Achæans and Dorians. The Ionians at any rate bear all the characteristics that we should expect from the kinsfolk of those pre-Achæan peoples without the Northern stiffening. They are intelligent, artistic, commercial, without any military virtues to speak of. They tend towards naturalistic deities like the Diana of Ephesus, and they scoff at the Olympian system. Their patron god is the sea-god. No deep gulf, such as that of race, separates them from the Lydian and Carian peoples behind them. Moreover, we can find the period and the political motive when the legends of their foundation from Athens first came into vogue. In the East “Javan” was the collective name for the Greeks.

In the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries cities like Miletus, Ephesus, and Mitylene on Lesbos were the greatest cities of the Greek world, in size, riches, and culture. They in their turn were sending colonies into the Black Sea, to tap its rich corn-growing and wool-producing regions. We have seen something of the wisdom of Thales, and we must allow our imaginations to suggest what a vast amount of preliminary knowledge and culture is required before a man can calculate an eclipse. It is likely that this learning came in the merchant ships from Egypt. We have seen also what a great part Ionia played in the development (if not the authorship) of the Homeric epics. It is here too that lyric poetry reaches its apotheosis. We have agreed, I hope, that the epic did not come into being out of the void, but that there must have been songs before there were long poems. Hence we are not driven to the extravagant assumption that Sappho and Alcæus were beginners at their trade.

The great lyric period of the seventh and sixth centuries belongs politically to an era of aristocracies and tyrannies. The aristocracies here were composed, not of farmers, as at Athens, nor of warrior-knights, as at Sparta, but of merchant princes who have always proved lavish patrons of a certain kind of art and literature. Most of the great poets seem to have been members of the aristocracy.

Sappho is a remarkable figure in the history of literature, the only woman who has ever reached the front rank among poets. We have of her only a few score lines of broken fragments, only two poems that exceed ten lines, and not one of thirty. Yet even from these ruined remnants we can feel across the ages the vital throb of her passion, speaking in music of altogether unequalled beauty. It is impossible to describe the emotion which scholars and poets of all ages have felt when they first stumbled upon

“Immortal Aphrodite of the starry throne, Daughter of God, weaver of guile, I beseech thee Neither to disgust nor to distress subdue, Lady, my heart....”

Or the broken marriage chorus:

MAIDENS

“Like the sweet apple blushing on the topmost twig, Top of the topmost, which the gatherers forgot. Forgot? Nay, but they could not reach to it.

YOUTHS

“Like the hyacinth on the hills which the shepherd swains Tread underfoot, and down to the earth the bright flower....”

But translation inevitably spoils the fragrance, as even Rossetti and Swinburne have found. It is of Sappho that Swinburne writes in her own metre:

“Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion! All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo; Fear was upon them, While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not. Ah the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent, None endured the sound of her song for weeping; Laurel by laurel Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead, Round her woven tresses and ashen temples, White as dead snow, paler than grass in summer, Ravaged with kisses, Shone a light of fire as a crown for ever. Yea, almost the implacable Aphrodite Paused, and almost wept; such a song was that song....”

The fertile and prurient invention of late Greek scholarship have given this sublime poetess a biography which is as false as it is unpleasant. From her own works, however, we can gather some interesting details. She belonged to the governing aristocracy of Lesbos, and, for a time at least, went into exile with it. The women of Lesbos seem to have formed rival salons of literary culture, and Sappho herself was the head of one. There was a good deal of jealousy between them. Strangely, the most ardent of her verse is addressed to one of her own sex, and since it cannot be true that she is only writing the amatory language of male poets, we must conclude that the women of Ionia imitated the men in that strange passion which ignored sex. To contradict the celebrated fable of her dramatic suicide from a cliff in consequence of an unrequited love, we have a fragment of her message to her daughter from a calm deathbed:

“ ... For it is not right that in a house the Muses haunt Mourning should dwell: such things befit us not.”

We cannot lightly dismiss as mere gossip the story of tender feeling, or at any rate tender expressions, between Sappho and Alcæus. They were contemporary love-poets of the same city. Sappho sometimes used the alcaic measure, and Alcæus the sapphic. Besides, we have it on the authority of Aristotle. One line of Alcæus to Sappho is preserved:

“Sappho, pure sweet-smiling weaver of violets.”

Alcæus too was a member of the Lesbian aristocracy. He alludes to a short-lived tyranny which was ended by the appointment of a constitutional tyrant or dictator, the wise and generous Pittacus. In the course of these disturbances Alcæus went into exile--among other places, we should note, to Egypt--while his brother took service under the King of Babylon. Such were the cosmopolitan relations of this period. The poet also fought for his country against the Athenians in the struggle for Sigeum, and humorously records the fact that he lost his shield in the rout. Such a loss was the regular mark of defeat, and generally regarded as a brand of ignominy to a soldier. But the Ionians took nothing seriously, not even war. It is strangely illustrative of the prevalence of types in Greek art that many lyric poets lost their shields in battle--Alcæus, Archilochus, and Anacreon--while the Roman Horace was too careful an imitator of the Greek lyric tradition to neglect their example in this respect. The poetry of Alcæus falls into two classes--banquet-songs in praise of love and wine, and political songs attacking his enemies. He too chiefly survives in fragments like

“Wine is the mirror to mortals....”

“Wine, dear child, and Truth....”

Though there is not the fire of Sappho in his work, it is singularly artistic, polished, and rich in the language of pure poetry. For the rest we must be content to admit his great reputation in antiquity and to enjoy him through the medium of Horace’s Latin.

These two great poets, who both flourished about 600 B.C., their predecessors Archilochus, Arion, Callinus, and Terpander, and their successors of the next generation Anacreon and Simonides, are the best representatives of the early culture of Ionia. To complete the picture we must remember her philosophers. Besides Thales and Bias, the two Sages (Bias, by the way, is credited with having proposed that the Ionians should leave their homes _en masse_ and found a united state in the west), there were students of natural philosophy like Anaximander, who made the first map and the first sundial and explained the evolution of life from chaos by the interaction of heat and cold, Heracleitus of Ephesus, “the weeping philosopher,” or Hecatæus of Miletus, the grandfather of history and geography. Hecatæus first explained away the gods as only deified mortals of past ages, a doctrine afterwards called Euhemerism. This was the Ionian attitude of scepticism which doubtless is to be discerned in Homer’s attitude to the gods. Even Sappho, the worshipper of Aphrodite, says in one fragmentary line:

“I know not what the gods are: two notions have I....”

Language is the easiest medium for art. We must not be surprised to find this high poetic and philosophic standard accompanied chronologically by plastic work, still to be called archaic, which shows the artist painfully struggling with his

material. Though Miletus was already growing rich with commerce the Ionian coin types are still very primitive. It is generally believed that coinage was invented by the Lydians in the seventh century, but for a long time the marks upon their coins were only mechanical impressions. One of the earliest attempts at an artistic motive is the coin found at Halicarnassus bearing a stag and an inscription which seems to mean “I am the mark of Phanes.” We know of a Phanes at Halicarnassus late in the sixth century, but this must be the token of an ancestor of his. Most of these coins are of electrum, a natural mixture of gold and silver.

Of the sculpture of this region we must be content with two examples. One is the so-called Harpy Tomb from Xanthus, in Lycia.[37] It shows us the “harpies” conceived as angels of death--by no means malignant, as the harpies afterwards became--carrying away the dead. Perhaps it would be better to call them Kēres, or Fates. In the centre of this north side is the dead warrior yielding up his helmet to Hades. On the west side the Queen of the Dead (Persephone) sits in majesty. Over the door is the common heraldic motive of the suckling goat, and to the right of her three worshippers bring offerings of poppies and sesame to another seated goddess. Archæologists date this monument in the latter half of the sixth century.

The other is the sculptured column from the temple at Ephesus.[38] Great interest attaches to this work from the inscription, which tells us that it was set up by King Crœsus of Lydia. This famous monarch was in power from 560 to 546 B.C. Himself half a Greek, with strong Hellenic sympathies and in close relation to the Delphic oracle, his growing power was overcoming and absorbing the independent cities of Ionia, who made no very violent resistance. But he himself had to face a still greater power then swallowing up the ancient kingdoms of the East--Cyrus of the Medes and Persians. Crœsus lost a great battle, and died, as ostentatiously as he had lived, on a splendid funeral pyre. The Greeks loved to invent stories about this plutocratic potentate, all illustrating one of their favourite maxims against pride, “Call no man happy until he is dead.” In defiance of chronology edifying interviews were composed between him and Solon. It is clear that the Greeks were tremendously impressed by his magnificent life and dramatic end. The fall of the Lydian power brought the Greeks face to face with Persia, and upon the issue of that momentous conflict hung the destinies of European civilisation.

On purely æsthetic grounds I prefer to illustrate this section with a picture which, one fears, chronologically belongs to a period at least two generations later. But the spirit of Sappho seems to be revealed in it as in no other work of art. These “Reliefs from the Ludovisi Throne”[39] were discovered in Rome with no inscription to tell us whence or when they had been brought there. Decoratively considered, they are superb examples of low relief. Observe how the motives are accommodated to the triangular slabs. On one is a flute-girl playing the double pipe. Feminine nudity is rare indeed in fifth-century work; probably no one but an _auletris_ would have been so represented at that date; but the topic is treated with all possible refinement and reserve. On the other is a hooded worshipper trimming or extinguishing a lamp. And who is the diademed goddess on the central slab? It is not the sea from which she is rising. It can be none other than the maid, Persephone, who spent half the year with her dark lord, Hades, under the earth, and half with her mother, Demeter, above, and when she came brought the spring and the flowers back with her. The rendering of the silken garments half revealing the fine anatomy beneath is so skilful and advanced that we are surprised to notice that the eyes are still archaically rendered.

* * * * *

While these lines were in the press there came news that

America had added yet another to her list of trophies captured from Europe. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has just acquired three more slabs which obviously belong to the same monument, and of which, by the courtesy of the Director, we are enabled to publish one of the earliest photographic representations.[40] It is said that these additional slabs had lain for years unrecognised in the hands of a collector at Lewes, in Sussex. Whether they formed the other half of the same throne, tomb, or altar, or whether they formed the second of a pair, the new slabs correspond precisely in shape, subject, and treatment to the old. The hooded figure of the old “throne” is balanced by the wonderfully realistic old woman of the new. The nude flute-player has her counterpart in the nude male citharist. And the long central slab is matched by the new relief of the winged male god and the two seated females.

As for the style, it is obviously identical; there is the same remarkable mixture of archaic imperfection in the delineation of heads and faces, with finished and confident mastery in the technique of relief. The architectural ornament, the carving of the nude bodies, the treatment of the wings and of the drapery, is as advanced as that of the Parthenon sculptures. Yet the archaic smile of the faces, the carving of the eyes, the imperfect setting of a head in profile upon a body full-face recalls the early Æginetan sculptures and the metopes of Selinus. We must, I suppose, date this work in the period between Marathon and Salamis, or a very little later. Even so, there is nothing even on vase-paintings to match the nude bodies or the winged god for half a century to come.

The subjects are equally puzzling. In the long slab the male god must be Love, or (as I rather think) Death. The holes in the marble indicate where the bronze balances he was holding were attached. The two female figures obviously indicate Joy and Sorrow. The god is smiling and the balance is inclined towards Joy. Close by the knees of the two women are mysterious objects of marble which seemed to hang from the scales and actually supported them. On each is a nude male figure with hands raised above the head as if in act to strike with the sword. The architectural scrolls which support this and the corresponding single figures of the new slabs seem to me to indicate a ship, especially as there is a dolphin, the regular symbol of sea, under one of them. In other corners there are pomegranates, a fruit associated with the underworld.

Mythological interpretation will no doubt attempt to bring these scenes into relation with the famous Homeric simile of the scales in connection with the fate of Hector. But that is highly unsatisfying. To my eyes the whole series bears reference to Death. The Winged God of Death reappears on Athenian funeral lecythi of a later date. The figure of Sorrow may be matched by a marble statue found at Eleusis. The musicians have the sad or pensive faces of dirge-players. The rising Persephone is the heroine of the Eleusinian myth of immortality. The old woman may be Fate, and her younger counterpart is surely trimming the lamp for the journey. In brief, I would hazard the opinion that the whole monument is Eleusinian and funereal in character, symbolical rather than mythological. Such a character is strange indeed for the period to which the art seems to belong, but the art itself is without any close parallel. More it would be unbecoming to say at present; the monument is _sub judice_, and until Professor Studniczka has spoken--“let no dog bark.”

THE WEST

Wheresoever the patron is there will the poets be gathered together. When tyrants like Polycrates and Peisistratus ceased to exist in the East, and when the Ionian cities had fallen under the Lydian and Persian despotisms, the courtly poets migrated with their lyres and other luggage to Sicily and South Italy, where there were aristocracies as elegant and tyrants as bountiful. The centres of commerce in this

period before Athens rose into prominence were Miletus, Corinth, Ægina, and Sybaris, but above all the first and the last. The West was then, as it is now, one of the greatest granaries of the world. Sicily in particular, with its fertile volcanic soil and its equable climate, was regarded as the original home of wheat. Milesian wool and Eastern wares found a ready market among the Etruscans, whose tastes were Greek, as their race originally was. Most of this traffic passed through the hands of Sybaris. As a result Sybaris, on her soft, warm gulf, became proverbial for wealth and effeminacy. In the early sixth century Sybaris seems to have been larger and richer than any other State at any period of Greek history. Her walls had a circumference of over six miles, her population was 100,000, she kept a standing force of 5000 horsemen, and in her last great battle is said to have put 300,000 men into the field. But in the midst of her opulence and luxury she fell--and was destroyed for ever, so that not a vestige was left to mark her site. It was her neighbour and rival Croton that destroyed her. Croton was not nearly so wealthy, but she was better organised for war. She prided herself on the number of prizes her athletes won at Delphi and Olympia, and she was led by the famous strong man Milo, he who

“Could rend an oak And peg thee in his knotty entrails.”

It is said that in the great battle on the river Traeis in 511 the cavalry of Sybaris were so much better accustomed to musical drill than to fighting that at the sound of the enemy’s fifes the Sybarite horses began to dance! The asceticism which led to Croton’s efficiency was a result of the teaching of Pythagoras of Samos, the great philosopher. A strange person was Pythagoras; his philosophy largely consisted of sound mathematics run mad on metaphysics. He attached mystical meanings to odd and even numbers; harmony was the principle of the universe. The abiding doctrine of his philosophy was that of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls:

“CLOWN. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?

“MALVOLIO. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.”

These doctrines of the immortality of the soul came, no doubt, from the East, for Pythagoras is reported to have sojourned in Egypt and visited Babylon. He founded a great secret society, which lived on monastic (and of course vegetarian) principles. He had considerable influence on the mind of Plato. His followers, banded together by mystical rites of initiation, took to playing an important part in the politics of their country, and fell into disrepute in consequence.

When Sybaris was destroyed some of the survivors took refuge at Posidonium, her colony. Here, at the modern Pæsto, is one of the most splendid relics of Doric architecture.[41]