Part 14

The side of this great contest which chiefly concerns us is its effect in promoting Athenian civilisation. Salamis and Platæa had pushed Athens forward into the front rank of Greece, to a position almost on a level with Sparta herself. It is true that she still had to ask Sparta’s permission, or to trick her into acquiescence, before she could build the walls she desired. But above all it was a triumphant vindication of the policy of Themistocles. Even Aristeides, who had come home to help his country in her hour of trial, had to admit that. Henceforth he seems to be working with Themistocles on the democratic side. For Salamis had outshone even Marathon. The “nautical rabble” had justified itself. The party of cautious hoplites, who feared democracy, no longer controlled the policy of the state. Instead, they remained on their devastated farms, grumbling at the “demagogues,” and issuing forth to support conservative politicians like Kimon and Nikias. Their great champion in literature is Aristophanes, who loves to depict the old Marathon men as the real bulwark of the state. When Athens was rebuilt Themistocles saw to it that the Peiræus should henceforth be part of the city, connected with it by long walls. The Peiræus stood for naval interests and naval empire, for commerce (though not for peace), and for democracy. It was not so far off but that the voters could flock up to Athens when an Assembly was to be held. It contained a large population of resident foreigners.

This was how Athens became a democratic city-state.

Democracy advanced in various stages: the poorest were made eligible for the magistracies; the encroaching power of the Areopagus was reduced; the magistrates (archons) and the Councillors were no longer leaders elected for merit, but ordinary burgesses chosen by lot; the Assembly became actually sovereign over administration within the terms of the constitution. Themistocles himself was presently ostracised, being far too great and clever to be a comfortable companion in a democratic city-state. Curiously enough, time has spared one of the very “ostraka,” or potsherds, bearing his name by which he was condemned to banishment.

Then an empire fell into their lap. It began, as most ancient empires did begin, with an alliance gradually transformed into a tyranny. Most Ionian cities had already won their freedom on the defeat of the Persian navy, but some had still to be liberated, and all needed protection for the future. The year after Platæa was spent by the Greek fleets in cruising about the Ægean, doing the work of liberation. At first Spartan admirals were in command, but the Ionians disliked Dorian discipline, and Pausanias, the victor of Platæa, was puffed up with pride and power. So they turned to Athens, whose commanders were Kimon, the rich and generous son of Miltiades, Aristeides the Just, and Xanthippus, the father of Pericles, all men of the aristocracy, but loyal servants of Athens and capable seamen. Thus they formed the Confederacy of Delos, a league of maritime states, Ionians who worshipped the Delian Apollo. On his sacred island was to be the treasury of the league, and there the common synods were to meet. This league Athens soon transformed into an empire. From the first some of its members were too poor to supply the normal unit of subscription, the trireme galley. These, then, contributed money on the assessment of Aristeides. Athens built the ships for them in her own dockyards and sent her collectors round for the money. Soon, with true Ionian slackness, all the states except Chios, Samos, and Lesbos converted their naval contribution into a money payment. States were coerced into joining the league, garrisons and magistrates were sent from Athens to hold them in subjection. Often colonies of Athenian citizens were planted on their territory. When the Persian danger was finally removed by the destruction of the Phœnician fleet at Eurymedon the allies began to contemplate withdrawal. They were very soon taught that membership was not a voluntary privilege. Now the empire of Athens was a naked despotism, only mitigated by the fact that many of the states were permitted to manage their own internal affairs. The treasury of the league was removed from Delos to Athens, and the money was spent at her discretion. Meanwhile the ambitions of Athens had extended with success. She was no longer content with a naval empire. She began to cherish plans of a great colonial dominion in the west; she wanted to eat up her shrunken neighbour, Megara, in order to have an outlet to the Corinthian Gulf; she took Naupactus on those waters as a base, and sent reconnoitring expeditions to Sicily and planned a great Panhellenic colony at Thurii, in South Italy. Moreover, she mixed in the affairs of great foreign Powers like Egypt. She attacked Cyprus and overran Bœotia.

In all this imperial policy from about 460 onwards the leader of the democracy, who by his personal ascendancy was almost as powerful as a monarch at Athens, was Pericles.[47] He was one of those aristocrats who succeed in securing the allegiance of the masses, like Tiberius Gracchus, or Pitt, or Salisbury, by their very aloofness. His single aim was to make Athens free, powerful, and glorious. In Greece imperialism was allied, as it is not with us, with radicalism. At home Pericles had swept away the last vestiges of power from the Areopagus; he had introduced payment of jurymen,

payment of soldiers and sailors, payment to enable the poor to attend the theatre. He was, in short, what we should now call a Socialist. Abroad he was the advocate of imperial expansion by land as well as sea. He was for keeping a tight hold over the “allies,” and he justified the appropriation of their subscriptions to the private purposes of Athens. He had apparently come into power over Kimon’s shoulders as the advocate of hostility to Sparta. The Peloponnesian War was of his making. There is much in this sketch of his policy which displeases us. But there was something in the personality of Pericles which made even critics like Thucydides venerate his name, while they execrated the men who carried on precisely the same line of policy after his death. This was his idealistic patriotism, free from all sordid and selfish motives. He believed in Athenian liberty, and he was prepared to extend it by force if necessary. This illogical and paradoxical state of mind is common to idealists; we ourselves have our pugnacious “pacifists,” our churches prepared to extend the Gospel of Peace by the sword.

Conflict with Sparta was inevitable. Athens was constantly treading on her toes in various parts of Greece. She was an upstart rival aspiring openly to the foremost place in Hellas. That being so, we have no need to inquire closely into the occasion of the great war which filled the latter quarter of the century from 431 to 404, and ended in the humiliating defeat of Athens. In any case the causes of it must be sought much earlier in the century, since Athens and Sparta had long been subsisting on terms of truce only.

The main features of the Peloponnesian War, which forms the theme of the great history of Thucydides, may be briefly stated. Almost before it began Athens had to surrender all her claims to land empire. That had been a mistake from the first, for Athens could never turn out a hoplite line fit to stand against the Spartan charge. The strategy of Pericles, dictated by necessity, was to retire within the walls of the city, relying upon the fleet to keep communications open and effect reprisals on the enemy. The weakness of this strategy lay in the fact that no fleet could touch Sparta, and that it put a very serious strain on the rural population of Attica, who had to desert their homes and see their crops ravaged in yearly forays from Sparta. That state of affairs led to a disastrous plague at Athens, and to a feeling of bitterness against Pericles which darkened his closing years. He died two years after the war began, and his place was taken by Cleon, who walked in his footsteps as democrat and imperialist, but, lacking his lofty personality and high birth, has come very badly out of the hands of history and literature. Aristophanes’ perpetual appellation of “tanner” directed against him probably has its point in the fact that he openly represented commercial interests. He was responsible for the shocking decree which condemned all the male inhabitants of Mitylene to death in punishment of their revolt, a decree which was repented and repealed at the eleventh hour, and he was a frequent obstacle to peace. But there is no ground for charging him with selfishness or dishonesty, and he was certainly not devoid of talent. He should be credited with the most brilliant achievement of the Athenian campaign, the taking of Sphacteria and its Spartan garrison.

It would seem that the war might have gone on for ever, but for the insane ambition of the Athenian democracy, which led her to despatch a huge fleet in 415 to Sicily for the subjugation of that island. It was the hare-brained scheme of that good-looking rascal Alcibiades. No one except Socrates could refuse him anything, much less the mass meetings on the Athenian Pnyx. So Athens squandered two great expeditions on an enterprise undertaken in ignorance and entrusted to inefficient commanders. With all her reserves, she just managed to fit out a new fleet and gain a few more sea-fights, but the end could not be long delayed. At last an Athenian admiral was caught napping at Ægospotami. There were no more ships, no more money in the treasury. After a brief siege Athens capitulated to Lysander in 404.

Such in briefest outline is the historical content of the Great Century, and such is the story of the first of European empires. What bearing has it upon our original inquiry as to the causes of the artistic and intellectual brilliance of the fifth century? We have, to start with, a people singularly endowed by Nature with quick intelligence and a marvellous sense of form. The Persian wars and the rise of Athens had added to these natural advantages a passion of pride in their city and an almost fanatical belief in her mission. Thus all her citizens were eager to do their utmost to increase the beauty and honour of the violet-crowned city and her virgin goddess. A city-state makes a much more direct appeal to the emotion of patriotism than the large modern territorial state. Lastly, there was freedom in Athens such as no state in history has ever enjoyed, freedom in thought as well as in politics. This has been denied, but the attacks made upon Pheidias and Pericles, and upon the philosophers Anaxagoras and Socrates, may all be explained on political grounds. We have only to look at the plays of Aristophanes to see what amazing liberty of speech prevailed at Athens. Moreover, it was a privileged and educated equality. We must never forget the thousands of slaves whose cruel toil in mine and factory rendered this brilliant society possible at such an early stage in history. It must not be forgotten that Greek liberty and communism was that of an aristocracy, however democratic might be the relations between its members. Thus you have at Athens a large citizen body lifted by the state above all sordid cares and interests, living a very full social life in the open air, with everything to stimulate intellectual interests--the daily speeches and debates in law-court and Assembly, the continual festivals and dramatic exhibitions, the endless conversations in the agora, the palæstra, and the various colonnades, the daily coming and going of ships from all quarters, constant embassies from the cities of the League, visits from all the talent of Greece, just sufficient intercourse with Egypt and the East--everything to stimulate the intelligence, and yet a dominant religious or moral conviction which tended inevitably to the austerest self-restraint and abhorrence of all extravagance.

PHEIDIAS

In the great oration over the bodies of the dead Athenian soldiers which Thucydides ascribes to Pericles the statesman is made to express his ideal of Athens. She was “the instructress of Greece.” She alone, he said, followed “culture without extravagance, and philosophy without softness.” She alone combined daring with reflection. She alone welcomed strangers, and, while reverencing the gods and the laws, permitted freedom of speech and conscience to all men. He congratulated her upon the happiness of life at Athens, the public displays and sacrificial banquets which afforded daily delight to her inhabitants. He did not lay much stress upon the outward magnificence of the city, for that, in a large measure, was his own work. But it is that aspect of his policy which we can all appreciate, whether we are democrats or imperialists or neither or both.

Pericles himself set the example which Athens followed of encouraging talent from all quarters to devote its abilities to the service of Athens. Aspasia seems to have maintained a salon which was frequented by most of the men of genius of the day. She herself was of Miletus, and being an Ionian, was accustomed to a freedom of intellectual intercourse denied to the cloistered women of Attica. Pericles had separated by mutual consent from his wife, and though the laws did not allow him to marry a foreigner, he lived with Aspasia through most of his public career. She was a wit as well as a beauty. At her house you would meet Pheidias the sculptor, Damon the musician, Anaxagoras the philosopher, Alcibiades, and Socrates. There, we may presume, the plans for the beautification of Athens were freely discussed.

It was a rare opportunity for the artists. Here was an imperial city to be rebuilt, and plenty of money to build with.

The directors of the work were Pheidias the sculptor and Ictinus the architect. Pheidias had learnt his craft under Agelâdas of Argos. Thus he stands at the very beginning of the period of fine art. Technical mastery over stone and bronze was by no means complete when he began to work. The “archaic smile” still hovered over the lips of contemporary sculptures, the eyes were too prominent, the eyelids were still cut to meet at the corners instead of overlapping, hair was still conventionally rendered by parallel grooves, or spirals, or roughly blocked out for coloration.

The body, however, thanks to athletic models, was already much more successfully delineated than the head. Perhaps the best examples of fifth-century sculpture before Pheidias are the pedimental figures from Ægina. These figures from the temple of Aphaia at Ægina were discovered by the English architect Cockerell in 1811; they were acquired by the King of Bavaria, restored by Thorwaldsen, and are now at the Glyptothek in Munich. Our illustration[48] will depict their style in all its archaic vigour. All but the face is highly successful; the naked muscular forms of the warriors follow even the poses of athletics, especially the figure in the attitude of a wrestler making his hold stooping forward to drag away the body of Patroclus. The reader should also notice how cleverly the pose is designed to fit that very difficult angle of the pediment where the roof slopes down. It taxed the ingenuity of artists to compose scenes to fit these triangular spaces. The ordinary rule is that the east pediments should depict a scene of divine peace and grandeur, that being the end at which the worshippers entered the temple. The west pediments, on the contrary, generally display a struggle. In this early Æginetan temple both ends are filled with scenes of warfare from the epic glories of Ægina, one of Ajax, and one of his father, Telamon. These Æginetan sculptures are assigned to the period between Marathon (490) and Salamis (480). The Harmodius group of which I have already spoken belongs clearly to the same phase.

If we turn from this to the Parthenon sculptures, we shall see the amazing swiftness of the blossoming of Greek art. With Pheidias, and largely no doubt owing to his genius, the plastic art has conquered its stubborn material, but it has not yet attained that fatal fluency which induces carelessness or conscious elaboration and extravagant striving for effect. This is the stage at which the arts and crafts produce their masterpieces. In our days, thanks to mechanical appliances, stone is as easy to work as clay. The sculptor produces his model, foreign underlings do the heavy chiselling, and the artist finishes it off. This is perhaps why Rodin produces such an effect of strength by leaving much of his work in the rough. We may be sure that Pheidias executed the whole process with loving care and diligence from first to last.

Here, alas! it must be confessed that we have not a single work which we can ascribe with certainty to the hand of the master himself. His great masterpieces, the Zeus of Olympia and the Parthenos of the Parthenon, were of ivory and gold. Of course they have perished utterly. We have to content ourselves with descriptions--and the ancient art critic was singularly inept even for an art critic--and casual attempts at copying on coins or statuettes. The coins of Elis do indeed give us a Zeus of considerable dignity which may impart some faint notion of the glorious original, but of the Athena Parthenos we have not even this relic. I decline to follow the text-books on Greek architecture by presenting the woolly-headed “Jove of Otricoli” or the well-groomed but fatuous old senator known as the “Dresden Zeus” for the work of Pheidias. Nor will I insult him by depicting the Parthenos by means of the stumpy “Varvakeion” or the inchoate “Lenormant” statuettes. Such

caricatures only disturb our judgment. For these statues we had better trust our imaginations, working upon what Pliny tells us: “The beauty of the Olympian Zeus seems to have added something to the received religion, so thoroughly does the majesty of the work suit the deity.”

But can you, after all, imagine the splendour of these two statues made by the greatest sculptor who has ever lived? The flesh parts were of ivory, the clothing of solid gold on a core of wood or stone. Zeus was of colossal size, forty feet high. On his head was a green garland of branched olive; in his right hand he bore a Victory of ivory and gold, in his left a sceptre inlaid with every kind of metal. On the golden robe figures and lilies were chased. The throne was adorned with gold and precious stones and ebony and ivory, with figures painted and sculptured upon it. Even the legs and bars of the throne were adorned with reliefs. Round it were low screens, blue enamel in front, and paintings by the sculptor’s brother, Panainos, at the back and sides. The stool on which the god’s feet were resting was adorned with figures in gold; the base, on which the throne rested, likewise. We must not picture ancient Greek art as cold and colourless like the marble statues by which it is represented in our museums. The Greeks loved colour, and used it everywhere. We have grown so accustomed to plain white statues that some of us are offended by the idea of colour in statuary and architecture. In this matter we may safely trust the good taste of the artists who could design and carve so wonderfully. The two favourite Greek marbles, the Parian and the Pentelic, are both of themselves very beautiful fabrics, far more lovely, with their glistening coarse grain and the intermixture of iron which gives them a warm yellowish glow, than the favourite modern marble of Carrara, which is so coldly white and so fine of texture as to dazzle and fatigue the eye and to blur all the delicate outlines. But the Greeks of that day looked upon even their lovely marbles as we do upon brick, good enough for building temples, but not worthy of the high gods. Ivory and gold for the gods, if the worshippers could afford it, otherwise bronze.

Regretfully, therefore, we must seek the genius of Pheidias in works which were probably constructed according to his designs, minor works, mere decorative reliefs applied to architecture, much defaced by accident and time, but still bearing the stamp of grandeur and dignity. It seems from the latest evidence that the execution of the Parthenon sculptures did not begin until after the banishment of Pheidias. But we may well believe that they had been designed by the master. In any case they are originals of the great period, and thus far better guides than any copies, however skilfully executed. Plutarch tells us that as the buildings of Periclean Athens rose “majestic in size and inimitable in symmetry and grace, the workmen rivalled one another in the artistic beauty of their workmanship. Especially wonderful was their speed. Pheidias was the overseer.” The surviving relics of the Parthenon sculptures fall into three groups, according to their place on the temple--the Pediments, the Metopes, and the Frieze.

Of these the Pediments are the most important for their size and prominence in the building. For example, they are the only external sculptures noticed by the traveller Pausanias. Moreover, each figure is a separate statue carved in the round, and perfectly finished back and front alike, though by no possibility could they be visible except from the front. Ruskin would inform us that this is evidence of the moral excellence of the artist. But the Greeks were a practical people who disliked waste in any form, and Professor Ernest Gardner is probably right in suggesting that the sculptor finished his statues in order that he might be sure they were rightly made. Such fidelity to his religious duty is evidence, after all, of moral excellence. Time has wrought cruel havoc with the sculptures. The central figures had gone even before Carrey made his drawings for the Marquis de Nointel in 1674. In 1687 a great explosion occurred, when a Venetian gunner (with the good old Venetian name of Schwartz) dropped a bomb into the

Turkish powder magazine stored in the temple, and wrought further havoc. Then the victorious General Morosini tried to remove some of the figures, and broke them in the effort. In 1801 Lord Elgin, armed with a firman authorising him to remove a few blocks of stone, carried off the greater part of the surviving sculptures. From him they were purchased by the British Government for the British Museum. Whatever the morality of this capture, it was a blessing in effect, for the Parthenon suffered further damage during the War of Liberation, and those stones which remain _in situ_ have deteriorated far more than those which were removed. Besides, the Greeks have still plenty of ancient marble to write their names on. Forlorn as they stand in the Elgin Room, battered and bruised as they are, all headless but one, and he much defaced, they still convey an impression of unsurpassed beauty and perfection of art.