Transcriber’s Note: As a result of editorial shortcomings in the original, some reference letters in the text don’t have matching entries in the reference-lists, and vice versa.

THE HISTORIANS’ HISTORY OF THE WORLD

GROTE

THE HISTORIANS’
HISTORY
OF THE WORLD

A comprehensive narrative of the rise and development of nations
as recorded by over two thousand of the great writers of
all ages: edited, with the assistance of a distinguished
board of advisers and contributors,
by
HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS, LL.D.

IN TWENTY-FIVE VOLUMES
VOLUME IV—GREECE TO THE ROMAN CONQUEST

T^he Outlook Company
New York

T^he History Association
London

1904

Copyright, 1904,
By HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS.

All rights reserved.

Press of J. J. Little & Co.
New York, U. S. A.

Contributors, and Editorial Revisers.

• Prof. Adolf Erman, University of Berlin.
• Prof. Joseph Halévy, College of France.
• Prof. Thomas K. Cheyne, Oxford University.
• Prof. Andrew C. McLaughlin, University of Michigan.
• Prof. David H. Müller, University of Vienna.
• Prof. Alfred Rambaud, University of Paris.
• Prof. Eduard Meyer, University of Berlin.
• Dr. James T. Shotwell, Columbia University.
• Prof. Theodor Nöldeke, University of Strasburg.
• Prof. Albert B. Hart, Harvard University.
• Dr. Paul Brönnle, Royal Asiatic Society.
• Dr. James Gairdner, C.B., London.
• Prof. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, University of Berlin.
• Prof. H. Marnali, University of Budapest.
• Dr. G. W. Botsford, Columbia University.
• Prof. Julius Wellhausen, University of Göttingen.
• Prof. Franz R. von Krones, University of Graz.
• Prof. Wilhelm Soltau, Zabern University.
• Prof. R. W. Rogers, Drew Theological Seminary.
• Prof. A. Vambéry, University of Budapest.
• Prof. Otto Hirschfeld, University of Berlin.
• Baron Bernardo di San Severino Quaranta, London.
• Prof. F. York Powell, Oxford University.
• Dr. John P. Peters, New York.
• Dr. S. Rappoport, School of Oriental Languages, Paris.
• Prof. Hermann Diels, University of Berlin.
• Prof. C. W. C. Oman, Oxford University.
• Prof. I. Goldziher, University of Vienna.
• Prof. E. C. Fleming, University of West Virginia.
• Prof. R. Koser, University of Berlin.

CONTENTS

THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY

Written Specially for the Present Work

By Dr. HERMANN DIELS

Professor in the University of Berlin.

It is a primary law of development that each generation should supplant and supersede that which preceded it. The parents bring forth the child, and when the child has advanced to full maturity they themselves lapse into oblivion; and the same fate overtakes their children and children’s children.

So it is with nations. One civilisation rises above the level of the rest, then sinks, yielding place to the fresh vigour of younger nations, to which it bequeaths its heritage of culture. For a while the elder mother-nation is held in remembrance as a teacher and model; but ultimately—when the new generation of nations has grown strong enough to maintain an independent existence—the elder vanishes to return no more.

Such a stage we ourselves seem to have reached. The peoples of the Classic Age have long passed away, but in the Renaissance the culture of their time rose again from the dead. A bevy of daughters entered upon the heritage of this mother—Italy, France, England, Germany, and many others—and added to it, each after her own fashion. Then they outgrew the imitation and mere echo of the antique, passing on to express in act an independent culture of their own; and now the time seems to have come when the modern spirit claims absolute liberty of action in every sphere, without the slightest reference to the traditions of antiquity. For the modern technician, the modern naturalist, the modern historian, the modern artist, the modern poet, the ancient world has no message. It is dead—dead past recovery, as we may say.

There is, however, one sphere in which it is not dead, where it still imparts fresh stimulus to the minds of men from day to day, in which it is still recognised as the guide to every fresh enterprise. This sphere is philosophy.

The last and loftiest height to which thinking humanity can climb is that comprehensive vision of all things which we Germans call Weltanschauung, and which the Greeks called Philosophia. In speculation of this illimitable range we have made but little advance upon the Greeks; nay, even those most modern of philosophers who, on the basis of biological knowledge, have built up the most modern of all conceptions of the world, are in unconscious agreement with the rudiments of Greek natural science in the sixth century B.C. Let anyone compare the “cosmological perspective” to which Ernest Haeckel has attained in his book Die Welträthsel [The Riddle of the Universe] (1900) p. 15, “from the highest point of monistic science yet reached,” with what Anaximandros taught in the reign of Cyrus, and he will perceive with amazement that modern times have hardly gone further by a single step. The eternity, infinity, and illimitability of the Cosmos; the substance thereof, with its attributes of matter and energy, which in perpetual motion occupy the boundless space; perpetual motion itself in its periodic changes of becoming and ceasing to be; the constant progress of decay and destruction in the innumerable celestial bodies which give place to fresh formations of a similar character; the process of biogenesis on our own planet, by which in the course of æons animal life was brought forth, and by which, through gradual metamorphoses, the vertebrates were evolved from its earliest forms, the mammalia from vertebrates, the primary apes from mammalia, and lastly, through progressive evolution, man was brought into being towards the end of the tertiary period—all these propositions had already been recognised and stated in germ by the Greek thinker who lived during the first generation of Greek philosophy. The sum total of the progress made in twenty-five hundred years, that what was then surmised from, rather than disclosed by, an empiric consideration of some few facts, has now been demonstrated in detail by scientific observation.

But these main propositions, which the modern scientist regards as his own gains, because he has had to win them afresh by his own toil from the errors of the ancient and mediæval world, are of no great significance when compared with the far greater residuum of questions that still remain unanswered. Du Bois-Raymond, as is well known, described these “world riddles” in the year 1880 as in part unsolved, in part insoluble. They are seven in number: (1) The nature of matter and force; (2) the origin of motion; (3) the first beginning of life; (4) the adaptation of nature to certain ends; (5) the rise of sensation and consciousness; (6) the origin of thought and speech; (7) freedom of will.

It is easy to see that, compared with these fundamental questions, which may be summed up in the great question of all, “God and the world,” the whole sequence of cosmic research from Anaximander to Haeckel is merely of secondary importance. It is, as it were, the surface of the matter; and even if, with Goethe, we feel the inadequacy of the apothegm of Haller, the poet and naturalist, “Into the heart of nature no created spirit may penetrate,” yet we cannot but see that as yet we poor mortals are only nibbling at the rind, and that centuries more of labour are needed to penetrate its diamond hardness.

Thus everything that has hitherto been achieved is, as it were, a mere prelude to the abstract presentment of cosmic principles, and consequently the rudimentary beginnings of study in this sphere are far less remote from its present condition than is the case in any other department of the intellectual activity of mankind. And hence, even at the present day, the consideration of Greek philosophy is not only the most interesting, but also by far the most directly profitable part of the study of antiquity. No man who has not thoroughly studied the systems of Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle can become a profound philosopher in our own time.

“The love of wisdom” was the name which, from the fifth century B.C. onwards, the Greeks bestowed on any kind of intellectual endeavour which was diverted from the practice and directed to the theory of life. The scope of this striving naturally varied in different periods. In the infancy of Greek speculation, i.e., in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., men pored with wide, childlike eyes over the marvels of nature that lay about them and tried to find in natural science the solution of the riddle of existence. Philosophy was then mainly the embodiment of scientific and mathematical research, that is to say, it was what we nowadays call “Science.”

A troublous period followed, represented by the Sophists, a time of youthful storm and stress, out of which the mature philosophy of ideas developed towards the end of the fifth century. The term “philosopher” begins to acquire a professional meaning. Side by side with the Sophist, who supplied “culture” in return for money, stood the philosopher, who directed the course of education without remuneration. At first, it is true, this education was confined to morals. But in Plato it proceeded to expand into a study that comprised mathematics, logic, physics, and ethics, as well as politics, forming a pyramid built on the broadest of possible bases and culminating in the idea of Good. By that time a “philosopher” had come to mean one who is capable of grasping the eternal idea (Plato, Rep. VI, 484 A). Next, in the Universal Encyclopædia of Aristotle, this platonic structure is completed and made habitable within and fitted to human requirements. Under him the idea and the term “philosopher” attained its maximum extension. Thereafter both begin to narrow down. The end of the fourth century witnessed the collapse of the Greek state, to the insecure structure of which the philosophers had never been blind.

With the fall of the Hellenic municipal system and the rise of the Macedonian sovereignty a new world comes into being, in which the leaders are monarchs and no longer individual citizens. The outlook and sphere of action of the individual is restricted. Men grow to be eminent in practical affairs, experts in the art of living, less eager to solve the riddle of the universe than that of the personal Ego, by withdrawing men from the tumult of external affairs and guiding them into the imperturbable calm of philosophic conviction as into a sure haven. Hence in the systems of the Stoa and of Epicurus and Pyrrho the designation of philosopher assumes the meaning of a counsellor in the conduct of life, who, in the lack of political liberty then prevailing, held up an ideal of liberty within, which no tyrant could menace.

In proportion as the sphere of philosophy in the Hellenistic world narrowed to the consideration of the Useful and the Practicable, the sphere of its influence widened. Alexander’s expedition had thrown the East open to Greek civilisation, and the assiduous and subjective temperament of the youth of the Semitic peoples was drawn to the wisdom of the Greeks. An active process of endosmosis and exosmosis set in between the countries of the West and East. During the period from the third to the first century B.C. this interchange created a new civilisation, destined to form the basis of the Imperium Romanum in matters temporal and the Imperium Christi in matters spiritual. But at this period the clear outlines of development tend to become blurred.

As the Hellenic nation expands into the Hellenistic peoples, as the national language of Greece becomes the common medium of the East, nay, of the whole civilised world, the eclecticism which had been formed out of certain elements of the old Greek philosophy under the dominant influence of the Stoa gained ground on all sides. In the time of Christ, Greek philosophy is an indispensable requisite of the higher culture, and the university of Athens, with its professors, whose appointment the state soon took upon itself, is the one where the educated Roman and Cappadocian alike must have studied. The Greek private tutor, recommended by the head of some school or other at Athens, becomes a standing institution in Roman families of distinction, and is treated with the contempt due to such a Græculus, ranking first among the slaves of the household.

Times soon change, however. Under the philosopher Marcus, philosophy gained admission to courtly circles, and presently became indispensable in the conflict with the increasing might of Christianity. After the Christian conception of the world had conquered under Constantine, the university of Athens became the bulwark of Paganism. Neo-Platonism, a new philosophy bred of the enthusiastic temperament of the East, the congenial philosophy of Plato and the erudition of Aristotle, fought the last fight with the courage of despair. But though its champions were, for the most part, superior in courage, moral character, and scientific learning to the bishops whom they withstood, philosophy and the ancient world had played out their part. In the latter end of the period of antiquity the overseer of any craft (as, for example, the overseer of the quarrymen in the Passio Sanctorum IV Coronatorum) was called in popular parlance philosophus to distinguish him from the artisans. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I

With the term “philosophy” as our guide, we have made a rapid superficial survey of the progress of the studies it included in these eleven hundred years of development (585 B.C.-529 A.D.). We will now consider in somewhat fuller detail the three phases which cover the Greek epoch proper, i.e., the first three centuries, from Thales to Pyrrho (585-270), with a special view to the study of their internal evolution.

The Greek nation is almost the last of all the civilised peoples of the ancient world to enter upon the scene of history and bulk largely in the minds of men. The long period during which the Greeks dwelt among their Aryan kindred, fruitful in intellectual progress as their language proves it to have been, has passed utterly out of the historic memory of the race. And yet the beginnings of scientific knowledge must have fallen within this period, in so far as the dim prevision of eternal and perpetual motion dawned upon men’s minds from the observation of the moon (mēnē, from the root mē, to measure), from chronology, and the consequent observation of cosmic laws. Nor have any other than mythical records come down to us from the first thousand years in which the Hellenes dwelt in the Balkan peninsula, then-future home, side by side with the original inhabitants and other migratory tribes; but from the buildings and monuments which the earth has yielded to Schliemann’s and Evans’ spades we can form some conception of the might of these rulers and the splendour of the knightly life they led.

A faint reflection of the Middle Age of Greece has been preserved in the epic poetry of Homer, the most ancient portions of which date back to the year 1000 B.C., while the latest bring us down to the time of Thales, that is to say, to the sixth century. The Homeric bards do not philosophise as the Stoics fancied they did, they look upon life with living eyes in the true artist spirit, and reproduce it “not sickbed o’er with the pale cast of thought.” Only in a few later passages of the Iliad and the Odyssey do we catch strange notes that harmonise ill with that joie de vivre which is the keynote of the epics. We see that in those strenuous days, when the Greeks were bent upon carrying their commerce to the uttermost ends of the earth and satisfying the ever increasing clamour of the populace for food and power, the nation begins to pass over from the light-hearted carelessness of the epic of chivalry to the harsher and more reflective didactic poetry of Hesiod. Indeed, in one of the later passages of the Odyssey (Nekyia) we note an evident reflex of the Orphic cosmologies, in which, under the name of a Thracian bard of remote antiquity, a mournful and pessimistic strain of poetry, dealing with sin and penitence, stands contrasted with the optimistic acceptance of the existing order of things which is characteristic of Homer.

The forces which brought philosophy, properly so called, to the birth at the beginning of the sixth century were three in number. First, the poetry then extant, which had cast into artless shape a number of speculative observations on the subject of the Cosmos—such as the conceptions of Oceanus encircling the earth, of Zeus dwelling in ether above it, of Tartarus beneath it, and so forth. Nothing but a cool head and a turn for systematisation was needed to convert these images into “ideas” and to combine the latter into a homogeneous and coherent conception. Another service was rendered by the study of geography, mathematics, and astronomy, developed as it had been by the long voyages of Milesians and Phocæans in the Mediterranean after they had supplanted the Phœnicians. A school of navigation came into being at Miletus, which city had successfully opened up the Euxine in the seventh century; and both Thales and Anaximander were trained in it. Miletus, where the trade with Egypt was started about the same time and the establishment of permanent factories like Naucratis taken in hand, likewise constituted the meeting-place of the geometry and astronomy of the Egyptians, whose learning was formerly much over estimated, with the far superior astronomical science of the Babylonians. The reports of mariners, charts, the catalogue of the stars, all combined with Oriental tradition and the unbiassed perspicacity of the Greeks to give the world the first science, i.e., research built upon a basis of empiricism, tested by the methods of mathematics and logic, and aiming at a harmonious interpretation of the Cosmos. To give a name to this study the Ionians evolved the idea of Historia, which in the sixth century took the place of Philosophia; the latter not coming into use until the fifth century.

In this place I must mention the third element, although it is not in evidence in the earliest exponents of Ionian philosophy. It is the tendency to mysticism, to abstraction from the world, then beginning to develop in the Orphic school, which has left traces of its influence with ever-increasing distinctness in Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Empedocles. It favoured the rise of a transcendental idealism which, although we do not find it matured into immaterial conceptions in these first natural philosophers, yet contains the germ of Plato’s dualistic idea of the universe. Not that the curve of development runs in smooth ascent from Thales to Plato; it exhibits the spiral windings inseparable from historic processes, since every new tendency calls forth the antagonistic principle to that which has spent its force, and thus brings about the necessity of reaction in a retrospective sense.

Thales, who enjoyed great repute in his native city of Miletus and throughout Asia Minor at the commencement of the sixth century, calls water the beginning of all things. This was no new idea. For before his time poets had spoken of Oceanus, of the origin of the gods, and of the deluge from which the world was born anew. And the infinite sea could not but lie close to the thoughts of a seafaring nation.

The novel and genuinely philosophic element in this proposition is rather the monistic endeavour to refer all phenomena to a single cause, to be sought not in heaven but on earth. For that which is taken as the beginning is not Oceanus, or, it may be, Poseidon, as in the older cosmogonies, but this palpable substance of water, out of which all things come and to which they all return. This original matter is indeed supposed to be animated by a divine spirit, but this divinity is not a person. There is no place for it on Olympus. Rather is it the expression of the immanent force which this philosopher recognised in the incomprehensible properties of the magnet, and there called “soul.” This enduing of nature with a soul is characteristic of the infancy of speculation, and hence this Ionic philosophy has also been called Hylozoism (the doctrine of living matter). The monistic impulse, which would bind the world and this single and supposed divine primeval force together, is diametrically opposed to the polytheistic tendency of the popular religion of Greece. Even in the first Greek philosophers this aspiration after unity points forward to monotheism, which was preached by Xenophanes, the Ionian, at the end of this same century.

Of all the achievements of Thales his prediction of the eclipse of the sun (May 28, 585) is that which caused the greatest amazement, although its scientific significance is the most trifling of any. For, as the history of astronomy proves beyond controversy, Thales and his whole generation lacked the rudiments of knowledge necessary for the calculation of eclipses, and had not the faintest notion of how they came about. Hence he can only have employed according to a fixed method some such formula as the Chaldeans had gained from empiric observation in calculating their eclipse period of eighteen years and eleven days (Saros). The rule only suffices for approximate predictions. As a matter of fact, Herodotus, the earliest witness to this event, states that Thales allowed a margin of a whole year for the occurrence of the eclipse.

Thales himself left no written works, and this Ionic Historia first emerges into the full light of day with Anaximander of Miletus, who founded the Ionic school about a generation later. In him the three forces are strongly marked and defined—first the scientific spirit, which impelled him to give visible expression to the geographical ideas of his countrymen by means of a map of the earth’s surface, and to make a systematic description of the heavens with the stationary and revolving celestial bodies. With him originated the conception of the constellations as a system of spheres rotating through and within one another, and it was his mathematical imagination that led him to assume the existence of certain fixed intervals between the revolving spheres, arbitrarily determined as to number, but expressing in their proportion the idea of harmony.

Here we have the germ of the speculations of Pythagoras, on which, as is well known, the laws of Copernicus and Kepler are founded. The vein of poetry in the Ionian character is manifest not only in this intuitive perception but in the aptness of his imagery, when he calls these spheres “chariot-wheels,” from the rim of which the fiery flames of the sun, moon, etc., start out like felloes. The scientific element in his system is evident in the manner in which he follows out biologically the idea of Thales concerning water. If all things have at one time been water, then organisms cannot originally have been created as land animals. Hence man, who now comes into the world utterly helpless, has been gradually evolved from pisciform creatures—the first germ of Darwinism.

Lastly the pessimistic mysticism which had lately arisen is clearly manifest in him. When he regards the origin of all individual existences as a wrong committed by them in separating themselves from the All-One, we can only understand him by referring to Orphic religious ideas, in which birth is looked upon as a decline and fall from the blissful seats of the gods and earthly life is represented as a vale of misery. Death is consequently the penalty which the individual pays for his presumption, whether the individual be a man or a celestial body. For the earth and all other Cosmoi are doomed to extinction in an “Infinite” which corresponds to the ancient idea of Chaos, and, like that, is not conceived of as a vacuum but as matter in an undefined form. This alternation of creation and annihilation, this perpetual motion, anticipates the eternal flux of Heraclitus of Ephesus, who at the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth, transformed the teaching of Anaximander into keener dialectics.

In comparison with this Ephesian thinker the successors of Anaximander at Miletus and whatsoever following they had down to the end of the fifth century sink into total obscurity. Before turning our attention to Heraclitus, however, we must first consider the man who transplanted the Ionic Historia from Ionia to Italy and there elaborated both the scientific and mystic side of it with marvellous assiduity—that is, Pythagoras.

Pythagoras left Samos about the year 530, and turned his steps towards Croton in lower Italy, where he found virgin soil for his labours. The mathematical foundation upon which the Ionic school is based attains an excessive predominance with Pythagoras. Epoch-making maxims are associated with his name, and probably not without good reason. But the speculative tendency of the Ionic mind prompted him to set up number itself as a principle; the Infinite of Anaximander being conceived of arithmetically as the Uneven, i.e., that which cannot be divided by two. Since the Even and Uneven alone co-exist, the sacred Three is compounded of Unity and Duality, as is also the Four (tetraktys), the root of Being. By simply adding these first four numbers together the Decas (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10) is obtained. The cosmos is made to consist of ten celestial bodies, corresponding to this Decas, by the addition of the heaven of the fixed stars as an outermost crust, and the earth and the “anti-earth” (antichthon) containing the central fire, at the heart of it. The earth and other stars moved round this centre, and here we have the first glimpse of the modern conception which explains the apparent diurnal motion of the heavens by the rotation of the earth. This rudimentary idea, as elaborated by later Pythagoreans, and particularly by Aristarchus of Samos in the Alexandrine period, constitutes the first starting-point we can assign to the Copernican system of the universe.

Pythagoras made the astounding discovery that the harmonic intervals of the seven-stringed lyre can be reduced to simple rational proportions (the octave = 1:2, the fifth 2:3, the fourth 3:4, the whole tone 8:9). He then sought for a like scheme in the harmony of the spheres, and, as the geometric habit of the Greek mind converted these arithmetical relations into lines and planes, the whole process by which the universe came into existence seemed to be a sum in arithmetic.

The strong tinge of mysticism which Pythagoras had brought with him from the Orphic influences of his native land to his new home in Italy served as a wholesome corrective to this exaggerated rationalism. Every religious sect thrives better in a colony than in the mother-country, as is demonstrated in the case of William Penn and many others. The aristocratic and religious league which Pythagoras founded at Croton prospered mightily, and presently the whole of lower Italy and Sicily was covered with branches of the order. Its religious ideas, particularly that of the transmigration of souls, were not new, although they have been claimed as peculiarly Pythagorean. Orphic mysticism had adopted in precisely the same fashion the notion of the fall of the spirit and its purification by transmigrations of all kinds into the bodies of men and animals. But the earnestness with which noble-minded men lived conformably to these ideas in matters of practice and brought them into connection with the results of scientific research strongly impressed the ancient world; and the close freemasonry which linked Pythagoreans from every quarter with one another set forth an ideal of manly friendship which served as a model for the institution of the Academy and similar philosophic societies.

But the too strongly marked political complexion of these Pythagorean societies contained the seed of their destruction. At the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth the aristocratic principle was everywhere on the decline, and in Italy itself the Pythagoreans were attacked on democratic grounds by Xenophanes of Colophon, who ridiculed the aristocratic physical sports in which even distinguished Pythagoreans (such as Milo) indulged, and vaunted the intellectual sport of his own Sophia. The said wisdom, it must be confessed, was of a negative rather than a positive character.

Xenophanes attacked Homer, the Bible of the ancients, in verses of fierce satire, showing the gods as there depicted to be examples of every kind of immorality. By the unparalleled vigour with which he transferred the monistic tendency of Ionic rationalism to the religious problem, he, first of all Greeks, originated the monotheistic conception of the Deity, which none of the later philosophers ventured to maintain with such unflinching boldness in face of the polytheism of the vulgar herd. To the aristocratic submission to authority in matters of belief required by the Pythagoreans this democratic philosopher opposed the prerogative of doubt, and he has consequently been lauded by the sceptics of all ages as their standard-bearer. At this stage of physical observation, indeed, doubt sets in concerning natural objects. Xenophanes discovers that the rainbow is an optical illusion. He promptly generalises in his scepticism; the sun and the other stars are nothing but fiery exhalations. This assumption will lead to further results among his Eleatic friends.

Meanwhile in the mother-country speculation advanced with huge strides. Heraclitus, a descendant of the royal dynasty of Ephesus, withdrew from his democratic fellow-citizens into haughty isolation. Instead of concerning himself with the scientific gossip which tended to make the Ionic Historia lose itself in detail, he laid stress upon the vast concatenation of things. He made the fundamental laws of thought his starting-point, in place of the principles of mathematics. The selection of physical propositions which he deduced poetically from his observations of nature are far more than mere natural symbolism. Fire, constantly transformed into water and earth and as constantly exhaling upwards to the celestial fire, is to him a type of the perpetual change of phenomena that veils the eternal and immutable Law (logos), identical in everything but name with the Harmony of the Pythagoreans, which expresses itself in numbers eternally the same. The law of man feeds, he says, upon the divine law manifesting itself in fire.

Here we have the germ of the vast scheme of law which binds God and the world, physics and morals, into a compact entity in the Pantheism of the Stoic philosophy. Since he places fire and soul upon the same footing, it follows that human physiology and psychology are explicable by the same formula, to which he likewise ingeniously adapts the Orphic ideas. Thus Heraclitus has exercised great influence upon succeeding generations, and Hegel’s system avowedly leans upon him.

Equally great is the influence of Parmenides, the Kant of the ancient world. Descended from an Ionian family of rank which had taken refuge at Elea in Italy at the time of the occupation of Phocæa (560), he carries on the tradition of the philosophic poetry of Xenophanes, whose Pantheistic Monism he defends in acute polemics against the “two-headed” Heraclitus. Being—one, eternal, indivisible, immutable, unchangeable—is alone intellectually conceivable. All beside—multiplicity, divisibility, mobility, variability—is logically inconceivable and therefore non-existent. Reason (logos) is consequently the measure of all things. His system is abstract and logical to absurdity, but his postulate that this monistic Being must be bounded like a globe that is equally closed in all directions reminds us that we are still in the age of physics. In him the scepticism of Xenophanes hardens into the assertion that everything which contravenes his logical postulate of the Sole Existent—such as multiplicity, colour, motion, becoming and ceasing to be—is mere illusion.

The logical and sceptical bias of the Eleatics is surpassed by the hair-splitting dialectics of Zeno, whose evidences against motion and multiplicity still perplex the thinkers of to-day. On the one hand this precise manipulation of the laws of thought which represents the culminating point of Ionic rationalism redeems the negative Sophism which was beginning to deny the actuality and perceptibility of things themselves (Protagoras, Gorgias), while on the other hand the positive result of this strict definition of the highest conception of Being was to call forth a series of systems which came into existence almost simultaneously, though subject in part to reciprocal influence, a little before the middle of the fifth century. Such was the Doctrine of the Elements taught by Empedocles of Agrigentum, who once more found the idea of the imperishable principle in the fourfold root of Being (the four elements) and brought about the Heraclitic alternation of the external world by the introduction of the two polar forces of love and hate.

The idea of the Element in endless subdivision (which could not be evaded in the world-process of Empedocles) and in endless diversity of quality was strongly brought out by Anaxagoras the Ionian in his homoiomere. To this chaos he opposed the thinking and directing reason (nous) as a distinct existence, thus definitely breaking with the idea of a hylozoistic union of matter and force, which had already threatened to go to pieces in the systems of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and setting forth the positive dualism of God and the world, i.e., of the Universal Reason working towards predetermined ends and the blind chaotic mass of matter.

More important than either of these two is Leucippus of Miletus, the founder of the atomistic theory, who, as Theophrastus rightly asserts, starts from the position of Parmenides. For he finds the homogeneous, eternal, complete, and indivisible, unchangeable Existence, to which no quality can be ascribed, in the “atom,” and solves the difficulties which arose for the Eleatics out of the idea of multiplicity by assuming the existence of an infinite number of such units. Hence results a mechanical interpretation of nature, which proved of all ancient systems the most serviceable for the elucidation of physical and physiological facts. By explaining sensory impressions by mechanical transmission from object to subject, he propounds the first theory of sensory perception, and since, in consequence of this assumption, he regards such qualities as colour, taste, etc., as subjective sensory impressions to which atoms in different arrangements correspond objectively, he lays the foundation of a distinction between primary and secondary qualities which has not been rightly appreciated until modern days.

Generally speaking, the value of the Leucippic theory has only been recognised since the Renaissance. For although Democritus of Abdera extended his master’s admirable system to fresh departments of knowledge, established it more firmly by combating the sensualism of Protagoras and other theories arising from a misunderstanding of Leucippus, and, above all, brought it to a high pitch of mathematical and notional exactitude, yet the atomistic school which continued to exist at Abdera till into the fourth century has passed almost utterly out of mind. Plato ignored it, although he adopted many of its theories indirectly; Aristotle alone made use of it, though not as regards the main points of its teachings; and Epicurus, who borrowed from it almost the whole of his theoretical science, by this very absorption played the chief part in the destruction of the Abderite writings, the greatest loss that science has ever suffered.

How can we explain this astounding disregard of atomistic philosophy? In some degree by the fact that Leucippus settled in the barbarous north, far away from Athens, which had grown since the Persian wars to be more and more the prytaneion, or central focus of warmth to Hellas, and drew all talent to itself from every quarter; and further, from the fact that the natural science which was dominant in the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth—and was regarded, indeed, as the only legitimate kind of scientific thought—lost its hold on men’s minds towards the middle of the fifth century. We have evidence of this in Eleatism, which, with Zeno and Melissus, devoted itself to purely dialectical questions and abandoned the interpretation of nature. We have evidence of it, again, in Empedocles, who in his second series of didactic poems (Katharmoi) flings himself into the arms of Orphic mysticism; and in his pupil, Gorgias, who proceeded from physics to nihilism and thence to mere superficial rhetoric. We have the strongest proof of all in Democritus himself, who embraced inductive logic, æsthetics, grammar, and ethics within the range of his studies as well as the old questions of physics. Thus during the Peloponnesian War the way was prepared for the new epoch which was performed with Athens for a stage, and Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle for heroes.

II

Socrates, the Athenian, brought philosophy, as Cicero says, from heaven to earth; that is to say, in place of one-sided speculation upon nature he pursued an equally one-sided study of ethics. In his practical, matter-of-fact way he availed himself of what Eleatic ontology had acquired in order to settle the fundamental ideas of morality and to demonstrate the possibility of scientific proof in face of the nihilistic fallacies of sophistry which despaired of both. So much we may accept as certain from received accounts. All the details of his teaching are wrapped in doubt, for we possess no historical account of it, but merely works of an apologetic character, in which liberal and justifiable advantage is taken of the prerogatives of fiction. Neither Plato nor Xenophon (the latter of whom did not take up his pen until after a superabundant crop of Socratic literature had come into being) can be accepted as historic evidence without further ado. Nevertheless both the disciples of Socrates and his opponents, Aristophanes and Spintharus (the father of Aristoxenus), bear witness to the extraordinary personality of the man.

The rights of the individual were not recognised until the fifth century. The atomistic theory of Leucippus and Democritus sees the Eternal and Constant not in the All-One of Xenophanes and Parmenides, but in the individual. The philosophy of the Sophists breaks the bonds of authority, and in the motto “Man (the individual) is the measure of all things,” Protagoras sets up the charter of subjective inclination. This charter Socrates adopts, but he opposes to the liberty of the individual will the counteracting force of obedience to the dictates of the individual conscience. But conscience, as the German and Latin name for it alike imply, means knowledge. A man should therefore act upon his own judgment, but only in so far as his action is founded upon norms scientifically determined. Thus Socrates reads a deeper meaning into the admonition of the Delphic god, “Know thyself,” by recognising the independence of the will.

Inasmuch as traditional usage and the law of the state are thus tacitly set aside (and on this point Aristophanes judged more correctly in his caricature than the apologists Plato and especially Xenophon will admit) Socrates is the preacher of a new private morality which traverses the public morality of classic antiquity. His death sentence is so far intelligible, though it remains an act of crude, reactionary violence. The greatness of soul, so far beyond the ordinary level of mankind, which, according to all accounts, the philosopher displayed at the near prospect of death, wrought upon a far wider circle than that of his disciples and contemporaries. His martyrdom set the seal upon the victory of the Ideal philosophy in Athens.

Socrates himself represents a complete individuality, hence his method of education has been of service to individualities the most dissimilar. What contrasting types do we find in Xenophon, the bigoted and stupid cavalry officer; and Plato, the witty and profound thinker; the cynic Antisthenes full of the pride of beggary, and the frivolous courtier Aristippus! They all portrayed themselves rather than their master in their writings, and yet each one of them has in some way or other his part in him.

Of all these disciples of Socrates, two only have influenced the afterworld, Antisthenes and Plato, Athenians both, the former a plebeian and founder of the philosophy of the proletariat, the latter, sprung from an old and noble family, an aristocrat of the purest water in all his philosophic ideas. Antisthenes carried the practical and matter-of-fact temper of his master to extremes. Virtue with him is a question of character, and therefore scorns empty words and learning. Logic and mathematics are superfluous, virtue is the only good, vice the only evil; everything else is a matter of indifference. This meagreness of theory is made good by strength of will. Force of character, freedom from the prejudices of conventional custom, conventional religion or conventional government—these are what distinguish the true freeman, the man free in soul, from the slave.

The impression produced by this king in rags in the midst of that age of decadence was striking beyond belief. He with his barking voice seemed to be the warning cry of the proletarian admonishing men to return to nature and to simplicity of life. His acute and witty writings were gladly read. His school, which can show one disciple of world-wide celebrity in the person of Diogenes, was gradually merged into the Stoa, which owes to Cynicism the popular tone of its influential system of ethics. Since the birth of Christ, the Cynic has come to life again, as of old in the guise of the mendicant preacher, proclaiming the gospel of renunciation and holding up the mirror to the corruption of the age. This new Cynicism was one of the most important precursors of the Christian apostolate. It awoke once more in the age of the Renaissance, finding its wittiest exponent in Montaigne, in whose steps J. J. Rousseau afterwards trod. In him we have the best typical example of the strength and weakness of this anti-scientific movement.

Plato, the antithesis of Antisthenes, continued in a direct line the thread of Athenian philosophy. He accomplished, in the widest sense of the term, the task which Socrates had only begun—that of establishing science, now discredited by the Sophist, on a new basis.

We are but imperfectly acquainted with the life of Plato and the phases of his development, for the chronology of his dialogues has not been determined up to this time, either absolutely or relatively, and it is a matter of doubt how far their artistic intention admits of a complete exposition of his system. For Plato’s true work was not his literary productions, which he himself regarded as of secondary importance and which obviously reproduce only a fraction of his researches and speculations, but his Academy, in which, from the eighties of the fourth century onwards, he gathered together the ablest scholars from amongst the youth of Greece for study and life in community. If all the transactions of this Academy had been preserved (like the information Aristotle gives us concerning the latter years), it may be that we should be able to trace distinctly the development of this wonderful man. For Plato is both the most gifted and the most complicated personality of Greek antiquity, and the depths and recesses of his nature were not wholly penetrated by his intimate friends, not even by Aristotle; how much less by us of this latter day. What we do possess is, however, amply sufficient to indicate at least his place in this summary.

If from the ranks of the Greek thinkers we have so far considered, we choose out the most eminent leaders and mark the lines of connection between them, we shall see how they all converge to Plato. He is the focus of ancient philosophy, whither all that went before him tends, and whence bright light and warmth stream forth upon posterity down to our own day.

The range of his achievements alone is enough to make this evident. Like the Ionians his grasp embraces cosmology, physics, and anthropology. Like the Pythagoreans he pursues the study of mathematics with ever increasing devotion, presumably as the basis of his speculations. Like Xenophanes he enters the school of the ancient Orphic Mysticism, and in the Timæus exalts it into a theology culminating in Monotheism. Like the Eleatics he ponders the problems of ontology. Like Heraclitus he inquires into the eternal flow of genesis; he ponders on the ideals of culture and the political theories of the Sophists, he wrestles with the ideal method of Socrates, he strives with hostile philosophers of the Socratic school on this hand and on that (Aristippus, Euclides, and Antisthenes), and, lastly, he strives with himself as his speculation develops more and more along theological and mathematical lines. For, as the genuine servant of Truth, Plato regards himself up to old age as in process of growing and learning. Nothing is so hateful to him as Dogmatism. Nevertheless there are so many opinions to which he held with unwavering constancy that we are probably justified in speaking of the system of Plato.

At the centre of it lies what has crystallised in more living shape out of the dry conceptions of the Socratic method—the domain of ideas. Even as Parmenides perceived Being in the eternal All-Existent, accessible to Reason alone, so Plato sees the being of individual things in that which pertains to them in common and as such can be grasped by the Reason. But even as the Eleatic “One” exists even apart from its recognition as an objective being, so these eternal and unchangeable archetypes (ideai) live in and by themselves as objective essences which exist wholly apart from the individual objects which partake of their form. These archetypes, like the Eleatic All-Existent, bear the name of unit (monad), only in Plato’s scheme there are many such monads, and their unchangeableness does not exclude the idea of causation. Thus his “ideas” are the “units” of Parmenides in multiplicity and the “conceptions” of Socrates endued by metaphysics with the breath of life.

To Socrates the idea of Good and of Virtue lay at the heart of his teaching, and thus the preponderance of the idea of Good is confirmed to his pupil, and in its theological elaboration this abstract idea is converted into the Supreme Reason, the first cause of Being, which is identical with the Deity.

As to the Eleatics, the external world was an illusion of the senses, and in any case a thing irrational, so matter and the world of phenomena which occupies the middle place between matter and ideas is hard to grasp, and Plato’s notion of the World-Soul which hovers between the two is as contradictory and obscure as that of the human soul. For with this gifted poet-philosopher there is much that tarries on the threshold of consciousness, and fails to struggle into clear light, a circumstance that harmonises with his own teachings, which find clearness and singleness of purport in the Eternal and Divine alone, obscurity and ambiguity in the intermediate terrestrial sphere of genesis, and utter darkness and inconceivability in the lower sphere of matter and non-existence. These three stages are repeated in his theory of the soul, which from desire rises to courage and ultimately to reason. His ethics and politics, which according to his Hellenic ideas are one and the same, are calculated for three classes of humanity—the iron, the silver, and the golden. The last two, the military and learned classes, are the only ones taken into account in the educational system of his ideal state; for the proletariat there is no need to be concerned, although Antisthenes and his successors regarded this very class as the only one capable of genuine philosophy. But Plato, like the aristocrat he was, has in view an elect type of humanity, exalted by exceptional intelligence above the brute multitude and the solid middle-class element and called by philosophy, i.e., the doctrine of ideas, to the helm of the ideal state.

The teaching of the Sophists had abolished law. Plato likewise knows no law on the lofty level of his ideal state. But the constraint of law seems superfluous where each individual is trained to be the ideal man. Forced by bitter experience to moderate his demands upon human nature and the state towards the end of his life, he sketched in the Laws, a model state on the basis of the old established system of government. But this system, like the metaphysics of his old age, seems, as it were, a desertion of his ideals. All that Plato achieved was the education of a race of pupils in his Academy who far surpassed the common standard of learning and morals, and who, though unable to save the state, yet maintained a high standard of knowledge and an ideal of morality for mankind in the midst of a corrupt society.

The greatest of these Academicians is Aristotle of Stagira, who displayed a versatility and thoroughness of research which appears absolutely incomprehensible in our eyes. Like Plato, he steadfastly held that knowledge is never complete, but that truth is to be found by unremitting persistence in inquiry. This is probably the reason why he gave the world some dialogues adapted to the public taste, and with the help of some of his pupils accumulated and published collections of historico-philological and scientific matter in an unpretentious form; but the systematic lectures in which he propounded to the more advanced followers of his school the results of his speculations and of his wide empirical observation, together with a critical treatment of his predecessors, were never published by him. He worked at these papers his whole life long, and many of the didactic writings which were edited by his pupils after his death, and which are all we possess of the whole body of Aristotle’s works, bear evident traces of gradual growth, correction, and amplification.

In a sketch like the present it is impossible to give so much as a summary of the contents of this admirably arranged encyclopædia, which ranked as the richest storehouse of every kind of empiric and speculative science from the beginning of the Christian era down to modern times. The essential points in which his life-work makes an advance on that of Plato are as follows:

Plato never went so far as to reduce his great discoveries and intuitions in every department of science to a complete and connected whole, being averse, on scientific and ethical grounds alike, from the dogmatic definition inseparable from any systematic treatise. This Aristotle did, dividing the whole body of philosophy under three principal heads (theoretical, practical, and poetical) and distinguishing subdivisions (logic, physics, metaphysics, ethics, and politics, and so forth) within these divisions by strongly marked lines of demarcation and methods rigorously exact. He is a Platonist in all things and feels himself so to be. Even where he displays most independence, as in the development of syllogisms or in biology, it is impossible to overlook his indebtedness to the bold speculations of the master.

If the whole work of Plato’s life and of his scholars between 388 and 348 had been preserved to us, the ultimate connection between Aristotle and the researches of the Academy would probably be even more evident than it is. Nevertheless there is a marked difference between the speculations of these two great philosophers. Plato wholly dissevered the Universal and Essential in things from the Terrestrial and placed it in a heaven beyond the earth.

Aristotle repudiates this transcendentalism all along the line. The Universal cannot exist without the archetype, the essence must be immanent in it. Hence the individual is the only true Substantive, containing Substance and Matter. This opposition of opinion concerning “Universalia” is, as is well known, the starting-point of mediæval Scholasticism (Nominalism, Realism).

The motion of passive substance towards the active form, i.e., the realisation of the Possible, leads up to the idea of development, of genesis (though not, indeed, in the modern sense) on which Plato’s speculations had made shipwreck, and passes over Plato’s rigid Eleatism to join hands with Heraclitus, the philosopher of change, with whom Aristotle sees the ultimate cause of all motion and all things in the Deity, itself as eternal as the world, which “yearns towards It as the bridegroom towards the bride.” Thus soul, too, is the pattern of the body, hence the purpose of its being. The body is but the instrument (organon) of the soul. Thus Aristotle first coins the name and idea of organic being and draws a sharp distinction between these animate creatures (plants, animals, and man) and inanimate nature. In ethics and politics his speculation treads in the footsteps of Plato, save that, in this province of thought also, he mitigates the uncompromising rigourism of the master by his innate bias towards the historically-established and practically-possible, and turns it to more profitable uses. The ethico-political speculations of both are, however, adapted to the aristocratic class at that time dominant in Greece. Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, conquered the East during his master’s life-time, but the philosopher’s opinion that the newly acquired continent should be governed by other laws than those of Hellas was not practically feasible. His ethics failed him utterly in face of the new political situation thus created.

III

At this juncture the cosmopolitan Cynicism, which had outgrown the narrow particularism of Hellenism as early as the time of Antisthenes, and the Stoicism which was built upon its foundation later on, proved the form best fitted to the times. Zeno, sprung of Phœnician blood and brought up in Cyprus, that is on semi-Asiatic soil, elaborated this theory of life at Athens, whither he came shortly after the death of Aristotle (about 320). After the dualism that had prevailed from Anaxagoras to Plato and Aristotle, in which God and the World were set over against one another as antagonistic principles, Zeno’s theory harks back to the monistic tendency of the Ionic period. Like that, it is realistic, nay, grossly materialistic, in contrast to the Idealism of Athenian philosophy. The result is a consistent Pantheism in which soul and body represent the analogon to God and the World. Both are of the same essential nature, and only temporarily divided by transitory differentiation of manifestation. Zeno’s morality is rigorous, and aims not at the moderation of the passions (like that of Plato and Aristotle) but at their extirpation. The inexorable law that holds the world and man in bonds from which there is no escape, exacts obedience, and to render it voluntarily is virtue.

Since the main object of the Stoic school is the training of the will, and since wisdom as such is only a means to an end, the dogmatic form that corresponds to Oriental modes of thought and the despotic system of contemporary government prevails throughout its teachings. Hence we can understand how this somewhat coarse, wire-drawn, as it were, but effective form of philosophy dominates the whole world from this time forward till about the second century A.D. In essentials it represents a revival of Heraclitism, just as the antithetical philosophy of Epicureanism, which prevailed for the same length of time, is in essence reminiscent of the Abderitic system.

Epicurus (born 342) was the son of an Athenian, but born at Samos. Thus he had opportunities of making himself acquainted with the philosophy of Democritus, which was more highly esteemed in Ionia than at Athens. He did not care for learning for its own sake, however, but for the sake of its practical application. In this respect, as also in his consistent materialism, he is closely akin to the Stoic school.

In dogmatic positiveness and immutability Epicurus far surpasses even the Stoic philosophy. With him the main consideration is a mode of life which induces a tranquil cheerfulness of temper by the refusal to admit all disquieting thoughts (as of death, immortality or divine punishment) and troublesome passions, and by which his followers, while here below, become partakers of the felicity of the gods. This quietist philosophy harmonised with the ideals of life which obtained at that period, and the ardent exaltation of friendship among this free-thinking fellowship and their ideal of human freedom and dignity atone in some degree for the hollowness of their theory of life.

Finally Scepticism takes the form of a school in Greece with Pyrrho, who died in the same year as Epicurus, 270 B.C. He, too, is only solicitous for tranquillity of mind, but he does not win it by dogmatic faith in this system of doctrine or that, but in believing nothing whatever, in thinking nothing right and nothing important. This thorough-going scepticism is bound to doubt even itself. As a result it neutralises itself and thus marks the spontaneous dissolution of Hellenic philosophy.

The Acropolis of Athens

CHAPTER XXXVII. THE REIGN OF TERROR IN ATHENS

Desolate Athens! though thy gods are fled,

Thy temples silent, and thy glory dead,

Though all thou hast of beautiful and brave

Sleep in the tomb, or moulder in the wave,

Though power and praise forsake thee, and forget,

Desolate Athens, thou art lovely yet!

—Winthrop Mackworth Praed.

[404 B.C.]

In the capitulation on which Athens surrendered, so far as its terms are reported by Xenophon, no mention appears to have been made of any change which was to take place in its form of government; and, if we might believe Diodorus, one article expressly provided that the Athenians should enjoy their hereditary constitution. This is probably an error; but if such language was used in the treaty it was apparently designed rather to insult than to deceive the people; and the framers of the article, who were also to be its expounders, had in their view not the free constitution under which the city had flourished since the time of Solon, but some ancient form of misrule, which had been long forgotten, but might still be recovered from oblivion by the industry of such antiquarians as Nicomachus. It is at least not to be doubted that the Spartan government, if it did not stipulate for the subversion of the democracy, looked forward to such a revolution as one of the most certain and important results of its victory. But it may have believed that its Athenian partisans would be strong enough to effect it without its interference. And we gather from a statement of Lysias, that Lysander, after he had seen the demolition of the walls begun, leaving his friends to complete their work, sailed away to Samos, now the only place in the Ægean where the authority of Sparta was not acknowledged.

If this was the case, he had scarcely laid siege to Samos before his presence was required at Athens. Theramenes, Critias, and their associates, wished to give a legitimate aspect to the power which they meant to usurp, and to overthrow the constitution in the name of the people. But they did not think it safe to trust to their own influence for the first step; and though Agis was still at hand, he might not enter so cordially into their views, and did not possess so much weight as Lysander. When therefore a day had been fixed for an assembly to consider the question of reforming the constitution, Lysander was sent for to attend the discussion. Theramenes had undertaken the principal part in the management of the business. He proposed that the supreme power should for the present be lodged with thirty persons, who should be authorised to draw up a new code of laws, which however was to be conformable to the ancient institutions, according to a model framed by Dracontides.

LYSANDER

The presence of Lysander, and the nearness of the Peloponnesian troops, deterred the friends of liberty from expressing their sentiments on this proposition. But its nature and tendency were clear, and a murmur of disapprobation ran through the assembly. Theramenes treated it with contemptuous defiance; but Lysander silenced it by a graver argument. He bade the malcontents take notice, that they were at his mercy, and were no longer protected by the treaty. The fortifications had not been demolished within the time prescribed, and therefore in strictness of right the treaty was void. Their lives were forfeited and might be in jeopardy, if they should reject the proposition of Theramenes. It was adopted without further hesitation; and a list of the Thirty, of whom ten were named by Theramenes, ten by the Athenian ephors, and ten were nominally left to the choice of the assembly, was received with equal unanimity. The names which it comprised, some of which soon became infamously notorious were: Polyarches, Critias, Melobius, Hippolochus, Euclidas, Hiero, Mnesilochus, Chremo, Theramenes, Aresias, Diocles, Phædrias, Chærilaus, Anætius, Piso, Sophocles (not the poet, who was now dead), Eratosthenes, Charicles, Onomacles, Theognis, Æschines, Theogenes, Cleomedes, Erasistratus, Phido, Dracontides, Eumathes, Aristoteles, Hippomachus, Mnesithides. Besides these a board of Ten was appointed—perhaps by Lysander himself—to govern Piræus. As soon as this affair was despatched, Lysander departed with his fleet to Samos, and the Peloponnesian army evacuated Attica.

The Samians, blockaded by land and by sea, were forced to capitulate before the end of the summer; they were permitted to leave the city, but not to carry away any part of their property, except the clothes they wore.

These terms might be thought lenient, had they been guilty of any ferocious outrage; but perhaps Lysander did not view their conduct in that light. He was however probably anxious to return home and to exhibit the fruits of his victory to his admiring countrymen, and may have been therefore the more willing to treat with the besieged. When they had withdrawn, he supplied their place with the exiles who had been expelled at various times in the civil feuds of the island, put them in possession of all the property of the vanquished party and appointed a council of Ten, to govern them, and secure their obedience. He then dismissed the allies to their homes, and himself with the Lacedæmonian squadron returned to Laconia.

He brought with him the Athenian galleys surrendered in Piræus, the last fragments of that maritime power which he had broken, trophies from the prizes taken at Ægospotami, and 470 talents [£94,000 or $470,000], the remainder of the tribute which he had collected from the Asiatic cities during the absence of Cyrus. But we are inclined to conclude from a story which, though it is not mentioned by Xenophon, is related by several later writers, with circumstances too minute and probable to be rejected, that he had previously sent a larger sum—perhaps not much less than a thousand talents—which he is said to have entrusted to the care of Gylippus, the hero of Syracuse. Gylippus was subject to the same infirmity which had occasioned the disgrace of his father Cleandridas. He could not resist the temptation of embezzling a part of the treasure, was detected and banished, and put an end to his own life by fasting. But even the sum mentioned by Xenophon was probably the largest that had ever been carried at one time to Sparta. To this were added crowns, and various other presents, which had been bestowed upon Lysander by many cities, which were eager to testify their gratitude and admiration, or to gain the favour of the conqueror.

This influx of wealth was viewed with jealousy by several Spartans, who dreaded the effect it might produce both on their foreign policy, and their domestic institutions: the example of Gylippus, though by no means an extraordinary case, might seem to confirm their views: and it appears that a proposal was made to dedicate the whole to the Delphic god. But Lysander and his friends strenuously resisted this measure, and prevailed on the ephors or the people to let the treasure remain in the public coffers. A part was employed to commemorate the triumph of Sparta, and the merits of the individuals who had principally helped to achieve it. Lysander himself adorned one of the Spartan temples with memorials of his two victories, of Notium and Ægospotami; and the first might indeed justly be considered as having opened the way for the last. Tripods of extraordinary size were dedicated at Amyclæ; and at Delphi the statues of the tutelary twins, Zeus, Apollo, Artemis, and Poseidon, forming part of a great group, which comprised those of Lysander, who was represented receiving a crown from Poseidon, his soothsayer Abas, Hermon the Megarian, the master of his galley, and upwards of twenty-nine other persons, Spartans or natives of other cities, who had distinguished themselves at Ægospotami, long attested the gratitude of Sparta towards gods and men.

CRUELTIES OF THE THIRTY

In the meanwhile the party which had usurped the supreme authority at Athens, had been unfolding the real character of its domination. The first care of the Thirty was to provide themselves with instruments suited to their purposes; they filled all important posts with their creatures. The ephoralty seems to have merged in their own office. The council was already for the most part composed of their own partisans, and needed but few purifying changes; it was now to become the sole tribunal for state-trials.

It might be inferred from the language of Xenophon’s history, that the legislative functions which they professed to assume were merely nominal; but we collect from a hint which he drops elsewhere, that they availed themselves from time to time of this branch of their authority, to promulgate laws, or regulations of police, either by way of precaution or of pretext; and that they exercised a censorial control over the occupations and conduct of their subjects. But it is probable that they never intended to publish any code, much less any constitution which might limit their power. Their main object, in which they seem to have been unanimous, was to reverse the policy of Themistocles and Pericles: to reduce Athens to the rank of a petty town, cut off from the sea, without colonies or commerce, incapable of resisting the will of Sparta, or of exciting her jealousy. It seems to have been with the design of signifying this leading maxim of their administration in a sensible manner, that they altered their position of the bema from which the orators addressed the assembly in the Pnyx, so that it might no longer command a view of the sea and of Salamis. They still more distinctly intimated their intention, while they took a step towards carrying it into effect, by selling the materials of the magnificent arsenal, which it had cost a thousand talents to build, for three, to a contractor who undertook to demolish and clear it away. It was perhaps at a later period, and for their own security, that they destroyed the fortresses on the borders of Attica. If they had succeeded in their aims, the history of Athens might now have been said to have closed; for it would have ceased materially to affect the course of events in the rest of Greece, and could have possessed no interest but such as might belong to the internal changes or quarrels of the oligarchy.

THE SYCOPHANTS

Happily for their country the diversity of their characters was too great to be reconciled even by the sense of their common interest, and proved a source of dissension which became fatal to their power. The men whose ability and energy gave them the predominance over the rest, were hurried by the violence of their passions into excesses from which their more prudent and moderate associates recoiled, but which they were unable to prevent. For some time they preserved a show of decency in their proceedings, and some of their acts were so generally acceptable, that the means, though contrary to law and justice, might to many seem to be sanctified by the end. The first prosecutions were directed chiefly against a class of men who were universally odious, and had contributed more than any others to involve the state in the evils from which they themselves now justly suffered, the informers, or sycophants as they were called at Athens, who had perverted the laws, corrupted the tribunals, and had gained an infamous livelihood by the extortion which they were thus enabled to practise on wealthy and timid citizens, but more especially on foreigners subject to Athenian jurisdiction, who were thus, more than by any other grievance, alienated from the sovereign state. The most notorious of these pests of the commonwealth were eagerly condemned by the council; and their punishment was viewed with pleasure by all honest men. Yet the satisfaction it caused must have been a little allayed in some minds by the reflection, that the form of proceeding by which they were condemned was one under which the most innocent might always be exposed to the same fate.

Greek Terra-cotta

(In the British Museum)

According to the new regulation the Thirty presided in person over trials held by the council: two tables were placed in front of the benches which they occupied, to receive the balls, or tokens, by which the councillors declared their verdict, and which instead of being dropped secretly into a box, were now to be openly deposited on the board, so that the Thirty might see which way every man voted. These however were not the only cases which they brought before the council, even in the early part of their reign. The persons who before the surrender of the city had been arrested on information, partly procured by bribery, and partly extorted by fear, or by the rack, charging them with a conspiracy against the state, but who had really been guilty of no offence but that of expressing their attachment to the constitution which was now abolished, were soon after brought to a mock trial, and judicially murdered.

[404-403 B.C.]

Even such executions might be considered as among the temporary evils incident to every political revolution: and there were some of the Thirty who did not wish to multiply them more than was necessary to their safety. But the greater number, and above all Critias, did not mean to stop here: and perhaps some signs of discontent soon became visible, which gave them a pretext for insisting on the need of stronger measures, and of additional safeguards. Two of their number, Æschines and Aristoteles, were deputed by common consent to Sparta, to obtain a body of troops to garrison the citadel. The ground alleged was that there were turbulent men whom it was necessary to remove before their government could be settled on a firm basis; and they undertook to maintain the garrison as long as its presence should be required. Xenophon’s language seems to imply that Lysander had by this time returned to Sparta; if so, upwards of six months had now elapsed from the surrender of the city. Lysander, whether present or absent, exerted his influence in their behalf, and induced the ephors to send the force which they desired, under the command of Callibius, who was invested with the authority of harmost. His arrival released Critias and his colleagues from all the restraints hitherto imposed on them by their fears of their fellow citizens. They courted him with an obsequiousness proportioned to the wantonness of the tyranny which they hoped to exercise with his sanction and aid.

The footing on which they stood with him is well illustrated by a single fact. An Athenian named Autolycus, of good family and condition, who in his youth had distinguished himself by a gymnastic victory, had in some way or other offended Callibius, who, according to the Spartan usage, raised his truncheon to strike him. But Autolycus, not yet inured to such discipline, prevented the blow by bringing him to the ground. Lysander, it is said, when Callibius complained of this affront, observed that he did not know how to govern freemen. He however understood the men with whom he had principally to deal; for the Thirty soon after gratified him by putting Autolycus to death.

In return for such deference he placed his troops at their disposal, to lead whom they would to prison: and now the catalogue of political offences was on a sudden terribly enlarged. The persons who were now singled out for destruction, were no longer such only as had made themselves odious by their crimes, or had distinguished themselves on former occasions by their opposition to the ruling party, but men of unblemished character, without any strong political bias, who had gained the confidence of the people by their merits or services, and might be suspected of preferring a popular government to the oligarchy under which they were living. Xenophon seems to believe that Critias was inflamed with an insatiable thirst for blood by the remembrance of his exile. But it would appear that ambition and cupidity, rather than resentment, were the mainsprings of his conduct, and that he calculated with great coolness the fruits of his nefarious deeds. Nor was it merely political jealousy that determined his choice of his victims; the immediate profit to be derived from the confiscation of their property was at least an equally powerful inducement. It is uncertain to which of these motives we should refer the execution of Niceratus, the son of Nicias, who shared his uncle’s fate, but may have been involved in it more by his wealth than by his relation to Eucrates. It was perhaps on the like account, rather than because of the services which he had rendered to the people, that Antiphon,[1] who during the war had equipped two galleys at his own expense, was now condemned to death. And it was most probably with no other object that Leon, an inhabitant of Salamis, who seems to have been universally respected, and a great number of his townsmen, were dragged from their homes and consigned to the executioner. The case of Leon is particularly remarkable for the light it throws on the policy of the oligarchs. After the arrival of the Lacedæmonian garrison they had begun to dispense with the assistance of the council; and Leon was put to death without any form of trial. But they did not think it expedient always to employ the foreign troops on their murderous errands; they often used Athenians as their ministers on such occasions, and men who did not belong to their party, for the purpose of implicating them in the guilt and odium of their proceedings. When they had resolved on the destruction of Leon, they sent for Socrates and four other persons, and ordered them to go and fetch him from Salamis. As his innocence was no less notorious than the fate which awaited him, Socrates, on leaving the presence of the Thirty, instead of obeying their commands, returned home. The rest executed their commission.

These atrocities soon began to spread general alarm; for no one could perceive any principle or maxim by which they were to be limited for the future; there was on the contrary reason to apprehend that they would be continually multiplied and aggravated. Theramenes, who was endowed with a keen tact which enabled him readily to observe the bent of public opinion, was early aware of the danger into which his colleagues were rushing; and he remonstrated with Critias on the imprudence of creating themselves enemies by putting men to death for no other reason than because they had filled eminent stations, or performed signal services, under the democracy; for it did not follow that they might not become peaceful and useful subjects of the oligarchy, since there had been a time when both Critias and himself had courted popular favour. But Critias contended that they were now in a position which they could only maintain by force and terror; and that every man who had the means of thwarting their plans, and who was not devoted to their interest, must be treated as an enemy.

This argument seems for the time to have satisfied Theramenes. But as deeds of blood followed each other with increasing rapidity, and the murmurs of all honest citizens, though stifled in public, began to find vent in private circles, Theramenes again warned his colleagues, that it would be impossible for the oligarchy to subsist long on its present narrow basis. He wished that they might be able to dispense with the foreign garrison, and foresaw that, if they persisted in their present course, they could never safely dismiss it. His advice now produced some effect on them; but they seem to have been alarmed not so much by the danger which he pointed out as by the warning itself. They knew that he was a man who had never adhered to any party which he believed to be sinking, and suspected that he might be meditating to put himself at the head of a new revolution, as in the time of the Four Hundred. And though his character was so generally understood that he had acquired a homely nickname,[2] which expressed the readiness with which he shifted his side, and the dexterity with which he adapted himself to every change of circumstances, still he might again become a rallying-point for the disaffected. To guard against this danger they determined to strengthen themselves by an expedient similar to that which had been adopted by the former oligarchy. They made out a list of three thousand citizens, who were to enjoy a kind of franchise which perhaps was never exactly defined; but one of its most important privileges was, that none of them should be put to death without a trial before the council. All other Athenians were outlawed, and left to the mercy of the Thirty, who might deal as they thought fit with their lives and property.

Theramenes objected to the new constitution, both on account of the small number of the privileged body, and its arbitrary limitation, which would show that the selection did not proceed upon any ground of merit.

Since they meant to govern by force, it was impolitic, he said, to establish such a disproportion between their strength and that of the governed. His objections were overruled, but not wholly neglected. They perhaps suggested the precaution which was immediately afterwards adopted. Under pretext of a review all the citizens were deprived of their arms, except the knights, and the Three Thousand, who were thus enabled to cope with the rest. The Thirty now believed themselves completely secure, and grew more and more reckless in the indulgence of their rapacity and cruelty. In the low state to which the Athenian finances were reduced, the maintenance of the garrison was a burden which they found it difficult to support; and, among other extraordinary means of raising supplies, it appears that they resorted to the spoliation of the temples. But this was an expedient which probably required some caution and secrecy, and which could not be carried beyond certain limits. One which perhaps appeared both safer and more productive was suggested by Piso and Theognis, two of their number, who observed that several of the resident aliens were known to be ill-affected to the oligarchy, and thus afforded a pretext for plundering the whole class.

They therefore made the proposition that each of the Thirty should have one of the wealthy aliens assigned to him, should put him to death, and take possession of his property. Theramenes very truly remarked, that the sycophants who had rendered the democracy odious to many, had never done anything so iniquitous as what was now contemplated by the persons who were used to style themselves the best sort of people, for they had never taken away both money and life; and he apprehended with good reason that this measure would render the aliens generally hostile to the government. But his colleagues, after what they had already done, were not disposed to view this question on the moral side, and, having braved the hatred of their fellow-citizens, they were not afraid of provoking the aliens. The proposition was adopted; and Theramenes was invited to single out his prey with the rest: but he refused to stain his hands with this innocent blood. It was however resolved to begin by taking ten lives; and, for the sake of covering the real motive, two of the victims were to be poor men, who would therefore be supposed to have suffered for some political offence.

[403 B.C.]

Men who were capable of perpetrating such actions could not long endure the presence of an associate who refused to take his full share of their guilt and odium. The colleagues of Theramenes resolved to rid themselves of a troublesome monitor who might soon prove a dangerous opponent. They first endeavoured to communicate their distrust of his designs to the members of the council in private conversation, and then concerted a plan for an open attack on him. But to insure its success they surrounded the council-chamber with a band of the most daring of their younger followers, armed with daggers, which they did not take much pains to conceal. Critias then came forward to accuse Theramenes, who was present.

Theramenes made a defence, which, with respect to the charges of Critias, was in most points a satisfactory vindication of his conduct. A murmur of approbation, which ran through the assembly, warned Critias that he could not safely rely on its subserviency for the condemnation of Theramenes; and, after having conferred a few moments with his colleagues, he called in his armed auxiliaries, and stationed them round the railing within which the council sat. He then told the councillors, that he thought he should be wanting in the duty of his station, if he suffered his friends to be misled; and that the persons whom they now saw round them, also declared that they would not permit a man who was manifestly aiming at the ruin of the oligarchy to escape with impunity. Now by virtue of the new constitution none of the Three Thousand could be put to death except by a sentence of the council; but all who were not included in that list might be sent to execution without any form of trial by the Thirty. He therefore declared that, with the unanimous consent of his colleagues, he struck out the name of Theramenes from the list, and condemned him to death.[b]

Xenophon gives a vivid picture of the scene that followed: “On hearing this, Theramenes sprang upon the altar of Vesta, and said, ‘But I, gentlemen, entreat you for what is most strictly legal—that it may not be in the power of Critias to strike off me, or any of you whom he pleases; but according to the law which these men passed respecting those in the list, according to that may be the decision, both for you and for me. And of this, indeed,’ said he, ‘by the gods, I am not ignorant, that this altar will be no protection to me; but what I wish to show is, that these men are not only most unjust with regard to mankind, but also impious with regard to the gods. At you, however, who are good and honourable men, I am astonished if you do not come forward in your own defence; knowing moreover, as you do, that my name is not at all more easy to strike off than each of yours.’ Upon this, the herald of the Thirty ordered the Eleven to come for Theramenes; and when they had entered with the officers, led by Satyrus the boldest and most shameless of their number, Critias said, ‘We deliver up to you this Theramenes here, condemned according to law: do ye, Eleven, seize, and lead him off to the proper place, and do your duty with him.’ When he had thus spoken, Satyrus dragged the condemned man from the altar, aided by the other officers. Theramenes, as was natural, called both on gods and men to look on what was doing. But the council kept quiet, seeing both the fellows of Satyrus at the bar, and the space before the council-house filled with guards, and not being ignorant they had come with daggers. So they led off the man through the market-place, while he declared with a very loud voice how he was being treated. And this one expression also is told of him. When Satyrus said that he would rue it if he were not silent, he asked, ‘And shall I not then rue it, if I am?’

“Moreover, when he was compelled to die, and drank the hemlock, they said that he flung out on the floor what was left of it, saying, ‘Let this be for the lovely Critias.’ Now I am aware that these sayings are not worth mentioning: but this I consider admirable in the man, that when death was close at hand, neither his good sense nor his pleasantry deserted his soul.”[c]

In Theramenes we find much to condemn, and nothing to approve, except that he shrank from following his profligate associates in their career of wickedness. If he had reason to complain that they did not spare the author of their elevation, the other victims of their tyranny had much more cause to rejoice in his fate. He seems to have died unpitied by either of the parties whom he had alternately courted and abandoned.

His death released the Thirty—among whom it is probable that Satyrus was immediately chosen to supply his place—from the last restraints of fear or shame which had kept them within any bounds of decency; and they now proceeded to bolder and more thorough-going measures. They emulated the ancient tyrants, who had often removed the lowest class of the commonalty, for whom it was difficult to find employment, from the capital into the country, and prohibited all Athenians who were not on the list of the Three Thousand from entering the city.

But by the oligarchs this step seems not to have been adopted so much with a view to their safety, as to increase the facility of rapine and murder. They continued to send out their emissaries to seize the persons and confiscate the property of the citizens, who were now scattered by their decree over Attica. The greater part of the outcasts took refuge in Piræus; but when it was found that neither the populous town, nor their rural retreats, could shelter them from the inquisition of their oppressors, numbers began to seek an asylum in foreign cities; and Argos, Megara, and Thebes, were soon crowded with Athenian exiles.

The oligarchs, notwithstanding their Lacedæmonian garrison, and their reliance on Spartan protection, began to be alarmed at the state to which they had reduced themselves, and to dread the vengeance of their exiled enemies, who were waiting so near at hand for an opportunity of attacking them; and they applied to the Spartan government to interpose for the purpose of averting the danger. The Spartans, instigated perhaps by Lysander, issued an edict, which showed to what a degree they were intoxicated by prosperity. It empowered the Athenian rulers to arrest the exiles in every Greek city, and under a heavy penalty, forbade any one to interfere in their behalf.

But this decree was no less impolitic than inhuman; it disclosed a domineering spirit, which could not but produce general alarm and disgust; but its object was beyond the reach of the Spartan power. At Argos and Thebes, and probably in other cities, the injunction and the threat were disregarded; the exiles continued to find hospitable shelter. The Thebans more particularly took pains to manifest their contempt for the Spartan proclamation by a counter decree, directing that the persecuted Athenians should be received in all the Bœotian towns; that if any attempt should be made to force them away, every Bœotian should lend his aid to rescue them; and that they should not be obstructed in any expedition which they might undertake against the party now in possession of Athens.

This measure, though the spirit it breathes is so different from that in which the Theban commander had voted for the extirpation of the Athenian people, was not dictated either by justice or compassion towards Athens, but by jealousy and resentment towards Sparta. Very soon after the close of the war causes had arisen to alienate the Thebans from their old ally. They were always disposed to set a high value on the services which they had rendered to the Peloponnesian cause and now conceived that they had not been properly requited. They put forward some claims relating to the spoil collected at Decelea, and likewise to the treasure carried to Sparta by Lysander, which, chiefly it seems at his instance, had been resisted or neglected. Hence they could not without great dissatisfaction see Athens in the hands of Lysander’s creatures.

THE REVOLT OF THRASYBULUS

[404-403 B.C.]

Thrasybulus, like Alcibiades, had been formally banished by the Thirty; though it is not certain that he was at Athens when their government was established. He was however at Thebes when their furious tyranny began to drive the citizens by hundreds into exile; and the temper now prevailing at Thebes encouraged him to undertake the deliverance of his country. Having obtained a small supply of arms and money from his Theban friends, he crossed the border with a band of about seventy refugees, and seized the fortress of Phyle, which stood on an eminence projecting from the side of Mount Parnes, with which it was connected by a narrow ridge with precipitous sides, twelve or thirteen miles from Athens. The fortifications had either escaped when the other Attic strongholds were demolished by the Thirty, or were soon restored to a defensible state. The oligarchs, confident that they should soon be able to crush so feeble an enemy, marched against them with the Three Thousand and their equestrian partisans.[b]

Officer’s Helmet

On their arrival, some of the young men, in a foolhardy spirit, immediately assaulted the place, producing, however, no effect upon it, but retiring with many wounds. When the Thirty were desirous of surrounding it with works, that they might reduce it by cutting off all supplies of provisions, there came on during the night a very heavy fall of snow, covered with which they returned the next day into the city, after losing very many of their camp followers by an attack of the men from Phyle. Knowing, however, that they would also plunder the country, if there were no watch to prevent it, they despatched to the frontiers, at the distance of fifteen furlongs from Phyle, all but a few of the Lacedæmonian guards, and two squadrons of horse. These having encamped on a rough piece of ground, proceeded to keep watch. There were by this time assembled at Phyle about seven hundred men, whom Thrasybulus took, and marched down by night; and having grounded arms about three or four stades from the party on guard, remained quietly there. When it was towards daybreak, and the enemy now began to get up and retire from their post on necessary purposes, and the grooms were making a noise in currying their horses—at this juncture the party with Thrasybulus took up their arms again, and fell upon them at a run. Some of them they despatched, and routed and pursued them all for six or seven furlongs; killing more than a hundred and twenty of the infantry; and of the cavalry, Nicostratus (surnamed The Handsome) and two others also, whom they surprised while yet in their beds. After returning and erecting a trophy, they packed up all the arms and baggage they had taken, and withdrew to Phyle. And now the horsemen in the city came out to the rescue, but found none of the enemy any longer on the spot; having waited, therefore, till their relatives had taken up the dead, they returned into the city.

Upon this the Thirty, no longer thinking their cause safe, wished to secure for themselves Eleusis, that they might have a place of refuge, if required. Having sent their orders to the cavalry, Critias and the rest of the Thirty came to Eleusis; and having held a review of the horse in the place, alleging that they wished to know what was their number, and how much additional garrison they would require, they ordered them all to write down their names, and as each one wrote it down in his turn, to pass out through the postern to the sea. On the beach they had posted their cavalry on both sides, and as each successively passed out, their attendants bound him. When all were arrested, they ordered Lysimachus, the commander of the cavalry, to take them to the city and deliver them up to the Eleven. The next day they summoned to the Odeum the heavy-armed in the list, and the rest of the cavalry; when Critias stood up, and said: “It is no less for your advantage, gentlemen, than for our own, that we are establishing the present form of government. As then you will share in its honours, so too you ought to share in its dangers. You must give your votes therefore against the Eleusinians here arrested, that you may have the same grounds with us both of confidence and of fear.” And pointing out a certain spot, he ordered them openly to deposit their votes in it. At the same time the Lacedæmonian guard under arms occupied half of the Odeum; and these measures were approved by such of the citizens also as only cared for their own advantage.

[403 B.C.]

After this, Thrasybulus took those at Phyle, who had now gathered together to the number of about a thousand, and came by night into Piræus. The Thirty, on this intelligence, immediately went out to the rescue with both the Lacedæmonians, and the cavalry, and the heavy-armed; and then advanced along the cart-way that leads to Piræus. The force from Phyle for some time attempted to stop their approach; but when the great circuit of the wall appeared to require a large body to guard it, and they were not a large one, they marched in close order into Munychia. The troops from the city drew themselves up so as to fill up the road, being not less than fifty shields deep. In this order they marched up the hill. The force from Phyle also filled up the road, but were not more than ten deep in their heavy-armed; behind whom, however, there were posted both targeteers and light dart-men, and behind them the slingers. These indeed formed a numerous body; for the inhabitants of the place had joined them. While the enemy were coming on, Thrasybulus ordered his men to ground their shields, and having grounded his own, but keeping the rest of his arms, he took his stand in the midst of them, and spoke thus:

“My fellow-citizens, I wish to inform some of you, and to remind others, that of the men who are coming against us, those on the right wing are they whom you routed and pursued five days ago; and those on the extreme left are the Thirty, who both deprived us of our country when guilty of nothing, and expelled us from our houses, and prosecuted the dearest of our relatives. But now truly they have come into a position, where they never thought of being, but we have always been praying that they might be. For we are posted against them with arms in our hands; and seeing that in former days we were arrested both when at our meals, and asleep, and in the market-place, while others of us were banished, when, so far from being guilty of any offence, we were not even in the country; for these reasons the gods are now clearly fighting on our side. For even in fair weather they raise a storm, when it is for our advantage; and when we make an attack, though our enemies are many, they grant to us, who are but few, to erect trophies. And now, too, they have brought us into a position, in which our opponents can neither hurl their spears nor their darts beyond those who are posted before them, through its being up-hill; whereas we, discharging down-hill both spears, and javelins, and stones, shall both reach them, and mortally wound many of them. And one might perhaps have thought that the first ranks, at any rate, must fight on equal terms; but as it is, if you only discharge your weapons with spirit, as suits your character, no one will miss, since the road is filled up with them, and standing on their guard they will all the time be skulking under their shields; so that we shall be able both to strike them when we please, like blind men, and to leap on and overturn them. But, sirs, we must act in such a way that each of us may have the consciousness of having been most instrumental towards the victory. For that (if God will) will now restore to us both country, and houses, and freedom, and honours, and children (such as have them), and wives. O blessed, then, those of us who, as victors, may see that sweetest day of all! And happy, too, he who falls! For no one, however rich he may be, shall enjoy so glorious a monument. I, then, when the time is come, will begin the pæan; and when we have called on Mars to help us, then let us all with one heart avenge ourselves on these men for the insults we have suffered.”

Having thus spoken, he faced about towards the enemy, and remained still. For their prophet gave them orders not to make the onset before some one on their side had either fallen, or been wounded: “When, however,” said he, “that has happened, I will lead the way, and there will be victory for you who follow, but death to me, as I, at least, believe.” And he spoke no falsehood; but when they had taken up their arms, he himself, as though led by some destiny, was the first to bound forward, and falling on the enemy was killed, and is buried by the passage of the Cephisus; but the rest were victorious, and pursued them as far as the level ground. There were slain there, of the Thirty, Critias and Hippomachus; of the ten commanders in Piræus, Charmides, son of Glaucon; and of the rest about seventy. The conquerors took the arms, but plundered the clothes of none of their fellow-citizens. And when this was done, and they were returning the dead under a truce, many on both sides came up and conversed together. And Cleocritus, the herald of the initiated,[3] being gifted with a very fine voice, hushed them into silence and thus addressed them:

“Fellow-citizens, why are you driving us from our country? Why do you wish to kill us? For we have never yet done you any harm; but have shared with you both the most solemn rites, and the noblest sacrifices and festivals; and have been your companions in the dance, and in the schools, and in war; and have faced many dangers with you by land and by sea, for the common safety and liberty of both parties. In the name of our fathers’ and our mothers’ gods, in the name of kindred, and affinity, and fellowship (for all these things have we in common with one another), cease sinning against your country, and be not persuaded by those most impious Thirty, who, for the sake of their own gain, have killed almost more of the Athenians in eight months than all the Peloponnesians in ten years’ warfare. And when we might live together in peace, these men inflict on us that war which of all is the most disgraceful, and grievous, and impious, and most hateful both to gods and men—war with one another. But, however, be well assured, that for some of those now slain by us, not only you, but we also, have shed many tears.” Such was his speech. The rest of the enemy’s commanders, from the very fact of their hearing such fresh appeals to them, led back their men into the city.

The next day the Thirty, quite dejected and solitary, sat together in council: while the Three Thousand, wherever they were severally posted, were at variance with one another. For as many as had acted in a more violent manner, and were therefore afraid, vehemently maintained that they ought not to submit to those in Piræus: while such as were confident that they had done no wrong, both reflected themselves, and were persuading the rest, that there was no necessity for these troubles: and they said that they ought not to obey the Thirty, nor suffer them to ruin the state. At last they voted for deposing them, and choosing others: and accordingly they chose ten, one from each tribe.

So the Thirty departed to Eleusis; while the Ten, together with the commanders of the cavalry, directed their attention to those in the city, who were in a state of great confusion and distrust of each other. The cavalry also bivouacked in the Odeum, with both their horse and their shields; and owing to their want of confidence, they kept going their rounds along the walls, after evening had set in, with their shields, and towards morning with their horses, being constantly afraid that some of those in Piræus might attack them. They, being now many in number, and men of all sorts, were making themselves arms, some of wood, others of wickerwork, and were whitening them over. Before ten days had elapsed, after giving pledges that whoever joined in the war, even though they were strangers, should have equal privileges, they marched out, with many heavy-armed and many light-armed. They had also about seventy horse; and making forays by day, and carrying off wood and corn, they slept again in Piræus. Of those in the city none else came out under arms, but the cavalry sometimes secured plunderers from the force in Piræus, and annoyed their phalanx.

Statue of Diana

And now the Thirty from Eleusis, and those in the list from the city, sent ambassadors to Lacedæmon, and urged them to come to their support, as the people had revolted from the Lacedæmonians. Lysander, calculating that it was possible quickly to reduce those in Piræus, when besieged both by land and by sea, if once they were cut off from all supplies, joined in getting a hundred talents lent them, and himself sent out as harmost, with his brother Libys as admiral. And having himself proceeded to Eleusis, he raised a large force of Peloponnesian heavy-armed; while the admiral kept guard that no provisions should go in for them by sea; so that those in Piræus were soon in a strait again, while those in the city, on the other hand, were elated again with confidence in Lysander.

When things were progressing in this way, Pausanias the king, filled with envy at the thought of Lysander’s succeeding in these measures, and so at once winning reputation and making Athens his own, gained the consent of three of the ephors, and led out an expedition.[4] All the allies also joined him, except the Bœotians and Corinthians.

Pausanias encamped on a spot called Halipedum, near Piræus, himself occupying the right wing, and Lysander, with his mercenaries, the left. And he sent ambassadors to those in Piræus, telling them to go away to their own homes; but when they did not obey his message, he made an assault (so far, at least, as noise went), that he might not openly appear to wish them well. When he had retired with no result from the assault, the day following he took two brigades of the Lacedæmonians, and three squadrons of the Athenian cavalry, and went along to the Mute Harbour, reconnoitring in what direction Piræus was most easy to circumvallate.

On his retiring, a party of the besieged ran up and caused him trouble; annoyed at which, he ordered the horse to charge them at full speed, and such as had passed the period of youth ten years to accompany them, while he himself followed with the rest. And they slew about thirty of the light-armed, and pursued the rest to the theatre in Piræus. There all the targeteers and heavy infantry of the party in Piræus happened to be arming themselves. And now the light-armed immediately running forward began darting, throwing, shooting, slinging. The Lacedæmonians, when many were being wounded, being very hard pressed, began slowly to retreat; and upon this their opponents threw themselves on them much more vigorously. Seeing this, Thrasybulus and the rest of the heavy-armed went to the support of their men, and quickly drew themselves up in front of the others, eight deep. Pausanias, being very hard pressed, and having retired about four or five furlongs to a hill, sent orders for the Lacedæmonians and the rest of the allies to advance and join him. There having formed his phalanx very deep, he led it against the Athenians. They received his charge, but then some of them were driven into the mud at Halæ, and the rest gave way, about a hundred and fifty of them being slain. Pausanias erected a trophy, and withdrew.

Not even under these circumstances was he exasperated with them, but sent secretly, and instructed those in Piræus, with what proposals they should send ambassadors to him and the ephors who were there. They complied with his advice. He also set those in the city at variance, and advised that as many as possible should collect together and come to the Spartan officers, alleging that they did not at all want to be at war with the men in Piræus, but to be reconciled together, and both parties to be friends of the Lacedæmonians. The ephors and the committee appointed to consider the question having heard all their statements, despatched fifteen men to Athens, and ordered them, in concert with Pausanias, to effect the best reconciliation of the parties they could. So they reconciled them on condition of their making peace with one another, and returning to their several homes, with the exception of the Thirty, the Eleven, and the Ten who had commanded in Piræus. If any of those in the city should feel afraid of remaining there, it was determined that they should establish themselves at Eleusis.

These arrangements being effected, Pausanias disbanded his army, and the party from Piræus went up under arms to the Acropolis, and sacrificed to Athene. But some time afterwards, hearing that the party at Eleusis were hiring mercenaries, they took the field en masse against them; and when their commanders had come to a conference, they put them to death; but sent in to the others their friends and relatives, and persuaded them to a reconciliation. And having sworn not to remember past grievances, they lived together under the same government, the popular party abiding by their oaths.[c]

FOOTNOTES

[1] This Antiphon has been confounded with the celebrated orator.

[2] Cothurnus—a shoe which fitted either foot.

[3] [That is, one of the communicants in the Eleusinian mysteries.]

[4] [This curious method of intervention for Athens’ sake has been variously interpreted. Thirlwall makes quite a drama of benevolent duplicity about it. According to others, Pausanias was simply moved by a desire to nip Lysander’s ambition and to put an end to further cruelties by the Thirty who were already winning general sympathy for the common people and the democratic cause of Athens.]

Greek Terra-cotta Figure

(In the British Museum)

Grecian Buckles

(In the British Museum)

CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE DEMOCRACY RESTORED

The period intervening between the defeat of Ægospotami (October, 405 B.C.), and the re-establishment of the democracy as sanctioned by the convention concluded with Pausanias (some time in the summer of 403 B.C.), presents two years of cruel and multifarious suffering to Athens.

After such years of misery, it was an unspeakable relief to the Athenian population to regain possession of Athens and Attica; to exchange their domestic tyrants for a renovated democratical government; and to see their foreign enemies not merely evacuate the country, but even bind themselves by treaty to future friendly dealing. In respect of power, indeed, Athens was but the shadow of her former self. She had no empire, no tribute, no fleet, no fortifications at Piræus, no long walls, not a single fortified place in Attica except the city itself.

Of these losses, the Athenians made little account at the first epoch of their re-establishment; so intolerable was the pressure which they had just escaped, and so welcome the restitution of comfort, security, property, and independence at home. The very excess of tyranny committed by the Thirty gave a peculiar zest to the recovery of the democracy. In their hands, the oligarchical principle (to borrow an expression from Burke) “had produced in fact and instantly, the grossest of those evils with which it was pregnant in its nature”; realising the promise of that plain-spoken oligarchical oath, which Aristotle mentions as having been taken in various oligarchical cities—to contrive as much evil as possible to the people. So much the more complete was the reaction of sentiment towards the antecedent democracy, even in the minds of those who had been before discontented with it. To all men, rich and poor, citizens and metics, the comparative excellence of the democracy, in respect of all the essentials of good government, was now manifest. With the exception of those who had identified themselves with the Thirty as partners, partisans, or instruments, there was scarcely any one who did not feel that his life and property had been far more secure under the former democracy, and would become so again if that democracy were revived.

It was the first measure of Thrasybulus and his companions, after concluding the treaty with Pausanias and thus re-entering the city, to exchange solemn oaths of amnesty for the past, with those against whom they had just been at war. Similar oaths of amnesty were also exchanged with those in Eleusis, as soon as that town came into their power. The only persons excepted from this amnesty were the Thirty, the Eleven who had presided over the execution of all their atrocities, and the Ten who had governed in Piræus. Even these persons were not peremptorily banished: opportunity was offered to them to come in and take their trial of accountability (universal at Athens in the case of every magistrate on quitting office); so that if acquitted, they would enjoy the benefit of the amnesty as well as all others. We know that Eratosthenes, one of the Thirty, afterwards returned to Athens; since there remains a powerful harangue of Lysias invoking justice against him as having brought to death Polemarchus (the brother of Lysias).

We learn moreover from the same speech, that such was the detestation of the Thirty among several of the states surrounding Attica, as to cause formal decrees for their expulsion or for prohibiting their coming. The sons, even of such among the Thirty as did not return, were allowed to remain at Athens, and enjoy their rights as citizens unmolested; a moderation rare in Grecian political warfare.

The first public vote of the Athenians, after the conclusion of peace with Sparta and the return of the exiles, was to restore the former democracy purely and simply, to choose by lot the nine archons and the senate of Five Hundred, and to elect the generals—all as before. It appears that this restoration of the preceding constitution was partially opposed by a citizen named Phormisius, who, having served with Thrasybulus in Piræus, now moved that the political franchise should for the future be restricted to the possessors of land in Attica. His proposition was understood to be supported by the Lacedæmonians, and was recommended as calculated to make Athens march in better harmony with them. It was presented as a compromise between oligarchy and democracy, excluding both the poorer freemen and those whose property lay either in movables or in land out of Attica; so that the aggregate number of the disfranchised would have been five thousand persons. Since Athens now had lost her fleet and maritime empire, and since the importance of Piræus was much curtailed not merely by these losses, but by demolition of its separate walls and of the Long Walls—Phormisius and others conceived the opportunity favourable for striking out the maritime and trading multitude from the roll of citizens. Many of these men must have been in easy and even opulent circumstances; but the bulk of them were poor; and Phormisius had of course at his command the usual arguments, by which it is attempted to prove that poor men have no business with political judgment or action. But the proposition was rejected; the orator Lysias being among its opponents, and composing a speech against it which was either spoken, or intended to be spoken, by some eminent citizen in the assembly.

Unfortunately we have only a fragment of the speech remaining, wherein the proposition is justly criticised as mischievous and unseasonable, depriving Athens of a large portion of her legitimate strength, patriotism, and harmony, and even of substantial men competent to serve as hoplites or horsemen—at a moment when she was barely rising from absolute prostration. Never certainly was the fallacy which connects political depravity or incapacity with a poor station, and political virtue or judgment with wealth, more conspicuously unmasked than in reference to the recent experience of Athens. The remark of Thrasybulus was most true—that a greater number of atrocities, both against person and against property, had been committed in a few months by the Thirty, and abetted by the class of horsemen, all rich men, than the poor majority of the demos had sanctioned during two generations of democracy. Moreover we know, on the authority of a witness unfriendly to the democracy, that the poor Athenian citizens, who served on shipboard and elsewhere, were exact in obedience to their commanders; while the richer citizens who served as hoplites and horsemen and who laid claim to higher individual estimation, were far less orderly in the public service.

The motion of Phormisius being rejected, the antecedent democracy was restored without qualification, together with the ordinances of Draco, and the laws, measures, and weights of Solon. But on closer inspection, it was found that the latter part of the resolution was incompatible with the amnesty which had been just sworn. According to the laws of Solon and Draco, the perpetrators of enormities under the Thirty had rendered themselves guilty, and were open to trial. To escape this consequence, a second psephism or decree was passed, on the proposition of Tisamenus, to review the laws of Solon and Draco, and re-enact them with such additions and amendments as might be deemed expedient. Five hundred citizens had just been chosen by the people as nomothetæ or law-makers, at the same time when the senate of Five Hundred was taken by lot; out of these nomothetæ the senate now chose a select few, whose duty it was to consider all propositions for amendment or addition to the laws of the old democracy, and post them up for public inspection before the statues of the Eponymous Heroes, within the month then running. The senate, and the entire body of five hundred nomothetæ, were then to be convened, in order that each might pass in review, separately, both the old laws and the new propositions; the nomothetæ being previously sworn to decide righteously. While this discussion was going on, every private citizen had liberty to enter the senate, and to tender his opinion with reasons for or against any law. All the laws which should thus be approved (first by the senate, afterwards by the nomothetæ), but no others—were to be handed to the magistrates, and inscribed on the walls of the portico called Pœcile, for public notoriety, as the future regulators of the city. After the laws were promulgated by such public inscription, the senate of Areopagus was enjoined to take care that they should be duly observed and enforced by the magistrates. A provisional committee of twenty citizens was named, to be generally responsible for the city during the time occupied in this revision. As soon as the laws had been revised and publicly inscribed in the Pœcile pursuant to the above decree, two concluding laws were enacted which completed the purpose of the citizens.

The first of these laws forbade the magistrates to act upon, or permit to be acted upon, any law not among those inscribed; and declared that no psephism, either of the senate or of the people, should overrule any law. It renewed also the old prohibition (dating from the days of Clisthenes and the first origin of the democracy), to enact a special law inflicting direct hardship upon any individual Athenian apart from the rest, unless by the votes of six thousand citizens voting secretly.

The second of the two laws prescribed, that all the legal adjudications and arbitrations which had been passed under the antecedent democracy should be held valid and unimpeached—but formally annulled all which had been passed under the Thirty. It further provided that the laws now revised and inscribed, should only take effect from the archonship of Euclides; that is, from the nominations of archons made after the recent return of Thrasybulus and the renovation of the democracy.

By these ever memorable enactments, all acts done prior to the nomination of the archon Euclides and his colleagues (in the summer of 403 B.C.) were excluded from serving as grounds for criminal process against any citizen. To insure more fully that this should be carried into effect, a special clause was added to the oath taken annually by the senators, as well as to that taken by the heliastic dicasts. The senators pledged themselves by oath not to receive any impeachment, or give effect to any arrest, founded on any fact prior to the archonship of Euclides, excepting only against the Thirty and the other individuals expressly shut out from the amnesty, and now in exile. To the oath annually taken by the heliasts, also, was added the clause: “I will not remember past wrongs, nor will I abet any one else who shall remember them; on the contrary, I will give my vote pursuant to the existing laws”: which laws proclaimed themselves as only taking effect from the archonship of Euclides.

By additional enactments, security was taken that the proceedings of the courts of justice should be in full conformity with the amnesty recently sworn, and that, neither directly nor indirectly, should any person be molested for wrongs done anterior to Euclides. And in fact the amnesty was faithfully observed: the re-entering exiles from Piræus, and the horsemen with other partisans of the Thirty in Athens, blended again together into one harmonious and equal democracy.

Greek Seals

Eight years prior to these incidents, we have seen the oligarchical conspiracy of the Four Hundred, for a moment successful, and afterwards overthrown; and we have had occasion to notice, in reference to that event, the wonderful absence of all reactionary violence on the part of the victorious people, at a moment of severe provocation for the past and extreme apprehension for the future. We noticed that Thucydides, no friend to the Athenian democracy, selected precisely that occasion—on which some manifestation of vindictive impulse might have been supposed likely and natural—to bestow the most unqualified eulogies on their moderate and gentle bearing. Had the historian lived to describe the reign of the Thirty and the restoration which followed it, we cannot doubt that his expressions would have been still warmer and more emphatic in the same sense. Few events in history, either ancient or modern, are more astonishing than the behaviour of the Athenian people, on recovering their democracy, after the overthrow of the Thirty: and when we view it in conjunction with the like phenomenon after the deposition of the Four Hundred, we see that neither the one nor the other arose from peculiar caprice or accident of the moment; both depended upon permanent attributes of the popular character. If we knew nothing else except the events of these two periods, we should be warranted in dismissing, on that evidence alone, the string of contemptuous predicates,—giddy, irascible, jealous, unjust, greedy, etc.—one or other of which have been so frequently pronounced by unsympathetic or hostile critics respecting the Athenian people. A people, whose habitual temper and morality merited these epithets, could not have acted as the Athenians acted both after the Four Hundred and after the Thirty. Particular acts may be found in their history which justify severe censure; but as to the permanent elements of character, both moral and intellectual, no population in history has ever afforded stronger evidence than the Athenians on these two memorable occasions.

If we follow the acts of the Thirty, we shall see that the horsemen and the privileged three thousand hoplites in the city had made themselves partisans in every species of flagitious crime which could possibly be imagined to exasperate the feelings of the exiles. The latter on returning saw before them men who had handed in their relatives to be put to death without trial; who had seized upon and enjoyed their property; who had expelled them all from the city, and a large portion of them even from Attica; and who had held themselves in mastery not merely by the overthrow of the constitution, but also by inviting and subsidising foreign guards. Such atrocities, conceived and ordered by the Thirty, had been executed by the aid, and for the joint benefit (as Critias justly remarked) of those occupants of the city whom the exiles found on returning. Now Thrasybulus, Anytus, and the rest of these exiles, saw their property all pillaged and appropriated by others during the few months of their absence: we may presume that their lands—which had probably not been sold, but granted to individual members or partisans of the Thirty—were restored to them; but the movable property could not be reclaimed, and the losses to which they remained subject were prodigious.

[403-402 B.C.]

The men who had caused and profited by these losses—often with great brutality towards the families of the exiles, as we know by the case of Lysias—were now at Athens, all individually well known to the sufferers. In like manner, the sons and brothers of Leon and the other victims of the Thirty, saw before them the very citizens by whose hands their innocent relatives had been consigned without trial to prison and execution. The amount of wrong suffered had been infinitely greater than in the time of the Four Hundred, and the provocation, on every ground, public and private, violent to a degree never exceeded in history. Yet with all this sting fresh in their bosoms, we find the victorious multitude, on the latter occasion as well as on the former, burying the past in an indiscriminate amnesty, and anxious only for the future harmonious march of the renovated and all-comprehensive democracy. We see the sentiment of commonwealth in the demos, twice contrasted with the sentiment of faction in an ascendant oligarchy; twice triumphant over the strongest counter-motives, over the most bitter recollections of wrongful murder and spoliation, over all that passionate rush of reactionary appetite which characterises the moment of political restoration.

“Bloody will be the reign of that king who comes back to his kingdom from exile”—says the Latin poet: bloody indeed had been the rule of Critias and those oligarchs who had just come back from exile: “harsh is a demos (observes Æschylus) which has just got clear of misery.” But the Athenian demos, on coming back from Piræus, exhibited the rare phenomenon of a restoration after cruel wrong suffered, sacrificing all the strong impulse of retaliation to a generous and deliberate regard for the future march of the commonwealth. Thucydides remarks that the moderation of political antipathy which prevailed at Athens after the victory of the people over the Four Hundred, was the main cause which revived Athens from her great public depression and danger. Much more forcibly does this remark apply to the restoration after the Thirty, when the public condition of Athens was at the lowest depth of abasement, from which nothing could have rescued her except such exemplary wisdom and patriotism on the part of her victorious demos. Nothing short of this could have enabled her to accomplish that partial resurrection—into an independent and powerful single state, though shorn of her imperial power—which will furnish material for the subsequent portion of our history.

If we wanted any further proof of their capacity for taking the largest and soundest views on a difficult political situation, we should find it in another of their measures at this critical period. The Ten who had succeeded to oligarchical presidency of Athens after the death of Critias and the expulsion of the Thirty, had borrowed from Sparta the sum of one hundred talents [£20,000 or $100,000] for the express purpose of making war on the exiles in Piræus. After the peace, it was necessary that such sum should be repaid, and some persons proposed that recourse should be had to the property of those individuals and that party who had borrowed the money. The apparent equity of the proposition was doubtless felt with peculiar force at a time when the public treasury was in the extreme of poverty. Put nevertheless both the democratical leaders and the people decidedly opposed it, resolving to recognise the debt as a public charge; in which capacity it was afterwards liquidated, after some delay arising from an unsupplied treasury.

The necessity of a fresh collection and publication (if we may use that word) of the laws, had been felt prior to the time of the Thirty. But such a project could hardly be realised without at the same time revising the laws, as a body, removing all flagrant contradictions, and rectifying what might glaringly displease the age either in substance or in style. Now the psephism of Tisamenus, one of the first measures of the renewed democracy after the Thirty, both prescribed such revision and set in motion a revising body; but an additional decree was now proposed and carried by Archinus, relative to the alphabet in which the revised laws should be drawn up. The Ionic alphabet, that is, the full Greek alphabet of twenty-four letters, as now written and printed, had been in use at Athens universally, for a considerable time—apparently for two generations; but from tenacious adherence to ancient custom, the laws had still continued to be consigned to writing in the old Attic alphabet of only sixteen or eighteen letters. It was now ordained that this scanty alphabet should be discontinued, and that the revised laws, as well as all future public acts, should be written up in the full Ionic alphabet.

Partly through this important reform, partly through the revising body, partly through the agency of Nicomachus, who was still continued as Anagrapheus [“Writer-up” of the old laws], the revision, inscription, and publication of the laws in their new alphabet was at length completed. But it seems to have taken two years to perform—or at least two years elapsed before Nicomachus went through his trial of accountability. He appears to have made various new propositions of his own, which were among those adopted by the nomothetæ: for these he was attacked, on a trial of accountability, as well as on the still graver allegation of having corruptly falsified the decisions of that body—writing up what they had not sanctioned, or suppressing that which they had sanctioned.

The archonship of Euclides, succeeding immediately to the Anarchy (as the period of the Thirty was denominated), became thus a cardinal point or epoch in Athenian history. We cannot doubt that the laws came forth out of this revision considerably modified, though unhappily we possess no particulars on the subject. We learn that the political franchise was, on the proposition of Aristophon, so far restricted for the future, that no person could be a citizen by birth except the son of citizen parents on both sides; whereas previously, it had been sufficient if the father alone was a citizen. The rhetor Lysias, by station a metic, had not only suffered great loss, narrowly escaping death from the Thirty (who actually put to death his brother Polemarchus) but had contributed a large sum to assist the armed efforts of the exiles under Thrasybulus in Piræus. As a reward and compensation for such antecedents, the latter proposed that the franchise of citizen should be conferred upon him; but we are told that this decree, though adopted by the people, was afterwards indicted by Archinus as illegal or informal, and cancelled. Lysias, thus disappointed of the citizenship, passed the remainder of his life as an isoteles, or non-freeman on the best condition, exempt from the peculiar burdens upon the class of metics.

Greek Fire Irons

(In the British Museum)

Such refusal of citizenship to an eminent man like Lysias, who had both acted and suffered in the cause of the democracy, when combined with the decree of Aristophon above noticed, implies a degree of augmented strictness which we can only partially explain. It was not merely the renewal of her democracy for which Athens had now to provide. She had also to accommodate her legislation and administration to her future march as an isolated state, without empire or foreign dependencies. For this purpose material changes must have been required: among others, we know that the Board of Hellenotamiæ (originally named for the collection and management of the tribute at Delos, but attracting to themselves gradually more extended functions, until they became ultimately, immediately before the Thirty, the general paymasters of the state) was discontinued, and such among its duties as did not pass away along with the loss of the foreign empire, were transferred to two new officers—the treasurer at war, and the manager of the theoricon, or religious festival-fund.

While the Athenian empire lasted, the citizens of Athens were spread over the Ægean in every sort of capacity—as settlers, merchants, navigators, soldiers, etc., which must have tended materially to encourage intermarriages between them and the women of other Grecian insular states. Indeed we are even told that an express permission of connubium with Athenians was granted to the inhabitants of Eubœa—a fact (noticed by Lysias) of some moment in illustrating the tendency of the Athenian empire to multiply family ties between Athens and the allied cities. Now, according to the law which prevailed before Euclides, the son of every such marriage was by birth an Athenian citizen; an arrangement at that time useful to Athens, as strengthening the bonds of her empire—and eminently useful in a larger point of view, among the causes of Panhellenic sympathy. But when Athens was deprived both of her empire and her fleet, and confined within the limits of Attica—there no longer remained any motive to continue such a regulation, so that the exclusive city-feeling, instinctive in the Grecian mind, again became predominant. Such is perhaps the explanation of the new restrictive law proposed by Aristophon.

Thrasybulus and the gallant handful of exiles who had first seized Phyle received no larger reward than a thousand drachmæ [£40 or $200] for a common sacrifice and votive offering, together with wreaths of olive as a token of gratitude from their countrymen. The debt which Athens owed to Thrasybulus was indeed such as could not be liquidated by money. To his individual patriotism, in great degree, we may ascribe not only the restoration of the democracy, but its good behaviour when restored. How different would have been the consequences of the restoration and the conduct of the people, had the event been brought about by a man like Alcibiades, applying great abilities principally to the furtherance of his own cupidity and power!

THE END OF ALCIBIADES

[405-403 B.C.]

At the restoration of the democracy, Alcibiades was already no more. Shortly after the catastrophe at Ægospotami, he had sought shelter in the satrapy of Pharnabazus, no longer thinking himself safe from Lacedæmonian persecution in his forts on the Thracian Chersonesus. He carried with him a good deal of property, though he left still more behind him in these forts: how acquired we do not know. But having crossed apparently to Asia by the Bosporus, he was plundered by the Thracians in Bithynia, and incurred much loss before he could reach Pharnabazus in Phrygia. Renewing the tie of personal hospitality which he had contracted with Pharnabazus four years before, he now solicited from the satrap a safe conduct up to Susa. The Athenian envoys—whom Pharnabazus, after his former pacification with Alcibiades, 408 B.C., had engaged to escort to Susa, but had been compelled by the mandate of Cyrus to detain as prisoners—were just now released from their three years’ detention, and enabled to come down to the Propontis; and Alcibiades, by whom this mission had originally been projected, tried to prevail on the satrap to perform the promise which he had originally given, but had not been able to fulfil. The hopes of the sanguine exile, reverting back to the history of Themistocles, led him to anticipate the same success at Susa as had fallen to the lot of the latter: nor was the design impracticable, to one whose ability was universally renowned, and who had already acted as minister to Tissaphernes.

The court of Susa was at this time in a peculiar position. King Darius Nothus, having recently died, had been succeeded by his eldest son Artaxerxes Mnemon; but the younger son Cyrus, whom Darius had sent for during his last illness, tried after the death of the latter to supplant Artaxerxes in the succession—or at least was suspected of so trying. Cyrus being seized and about to be slain, the queen-mother, Parysatis, prevailed upon Artaxerxes to pardon him, and send him again down to his satrapy along the coast of Ionia, where he laboured strenuously, though secretly, to acquire the means of dethroning his brother; a memorable attempt, of which we shall speak more fully hereafter. But his schemes, though carefully masked, did not escape the observation of Alcibiades, who wished to make a merit of revealing them at Susa, and to become the instrument of defeating them. He communicated his suspicions as well as his purpose to Pharnabazus; whom he tried to awaken by alarm of danger to the empire, in order that he might thus get himself forwarded to Susa as informant and auxiliary.

Pharnabazus was already jealous and unfriendly in spirit towards Lysander and the Lacedæmonians (of which we shall soon see plain evidence)—and perhaps towards Cyrus also, since such were the habitual relations of neighbouring satraps in the Persian empire. But the Lacedæmonians and Cyrus were now all-powerful on the Asiatic coast, so that he probably did not dare to exasperate them, by identifying himself with a mission so hostile, and an enemy so dangerous, to both. Accordingly he refused compliance with the request of Alcibiades; granting him nevertheless permission to live in Phrygia, and even assigning to him a revenue. But the objects at which the exile was aiming soon became more or less fully divulged to those against whom they were intended. His restless character, enterprise, and capacity, were so well known as to raise exaggerated fears as well as exaggerated hopes. Not merely Cyrus, but the Lacedæmonians, closely allied with Cyrus, and the decarchies, whom Lysander had set up in the Asiatic Grecian cities, and who held their power only through Lacedæmonian support—all were uneasy at the prospect of seeing Alcibiades again in action and command, amidst so many unsettled elements. Nor can we doubt that the exiles whom these decarchies had banished, and the disaffected citizens who remained at home under their government in fear of banishment or death, kept up correspondence with him, and looked to him as a probable liberator. Moreover the Spartan king Agis still retained the same personal antipathy against him, which had already (some years before) procured the order to be despatched, from Sparta to Asia, to assassinate him. Here are elements enough, of hostility, vengeance, and apprehension, afloat against Alcibiades—without believing the story of Plutarch, that Critias and the Thirty sent to apprise Lysander that the oligarchy at Athens could not stand so long as Alcibiades was alive.

[404 B.C.]

A special despatch (or scytale) was sent out by the Spartan authorities to Lysander in Asia, enjoining him to procure that Alcibiades should be put to death. Accordingly Lysander communicated this order to Pharnabazus, within whose satrapy Alcibiades was residing, and requested that it might be put in execution. Pharnabazus therefore despatched his brother Magæus and his uncle Sisamithres, with a band of armed men, to assassinate Alcibiades in the Phrygian village where he was residing. These men, not daring to force their way into his house, surrounded it and set it on fire. Yet Alcibiades, having contrived to extinguish the flames, rushed out upon his assailants with a dagger in his right hand, and a cloak wrapped around his left to serve as a shield. None of them dared to come near him; but they poured upon him showers of darts and arrows until he perished, undefended as he was either by shield or by armour. A female companion with whom he lived—Timandra—wrapped up his body in garments of her own, and performed towards it all the last affectionate solemnities.

A GREEK RELIGIOUS PROCESSION

Such was the deed which Cyrus and the Lacedæmonians did not scruple to enjoin, nor the uncle and brother of a Persian satrap to execute; and by which this celebrated Athenian perished before he had attained the age of fifty. Had he lived, we cannot doubt that he would again have played some conspicuous part—for neither his temper nor his abilities would have allowed him to remain in the shade—but whether to the advantage of Athens or not is more questionable. Certain it is that, taking his life throughout, the good which he did to her bore no proportion to the far greater evil. Of the disastrous Sicilian expedition, he was more the cause than any other individual; though that enterprise cannot properly be said to have been caused by any individual: it emanated rather from a national impulse. Having first, as a counsellor, contributed more than any other man to plunge the Athenians into this imprudent adventure, he next, as an exile, contributed more than any other man (except Nicias) to turn that adventure into ruin, and the consequences of it into still greater ruin. Without him, Gylippus would not have been sent to Syracuse, Decelea would not have been fortified, Chios and Miletus would not have revolted, the oligarchical conspiracy of the Four Hundred would not have been originated. Nor can it be said that his first three years of political action as Athenian leader, in a speculation peculiarly his own—the alliance with Argos, and the campaigns in Peloponnesus—proved in any way advantageous to his country. On the contrary, by playing an offensive game where he had hardly sufficient force for a defensive, he enabled the Lacedæmonians completely to recover their injured reputation and ascendency through the important victory of Mantinea. The period of his life really serviceable to his country, and really glorious to himself, was that of three years ending with his return to Athens in 407 B.C. The results of these three years of success were frustrated by the unexpected coming down of Cyrus as satrap: but just at the moment when it behoved Alcibiades to put forth a higher measure of excellence, in order to realise his own promises in the face of this new obstacle—at that critical moment we find him spoiled by the unexpected welcome which had recently greeted him at Athens, and falling miserably short even of the former merit whereby that welcome had been earned.

If from his achievements we turn to his dispositions, his ends, and his means—there are few characters in Grecian history who present so little to esteem, whether we look at him as a public or as a private man. His ends are those of exorbitant ambition and vanity; his means rapacious as well as reckless, from his first dealing with Sparta and the Spartan envoys, down to the end of his career. The manœuvres whereby his political enemies first procured his exile were indeed base and guilty in a high degree. But we must recollect that if his enemies were more numerous and violent than those of any other politician in Athens, the generating seed was sown by his own overweening insolence and contempt of restraints, legal as well as social. On the other hand, he was never once defeated either by land or sea. In courage, in ability, in enterprise, in power of dealing with new men and new situations, he was never wanting; qualities which, combined with his high birth, wealth, and personal accomplishments, sufficed to render him for the time the first man in every successive party which he espoused—Athenian, Spartan, or Persian—oligarchical or democratical. But in none of them did he ever inspire any lasting confidence; all successively threw him off. On the whole, we shall find few men in whom eminent capacities for action and command are so thoroughly marred by an assemblage of bad moral qualities as Alcibiades.[b]

LIFE AT ATHENS

[404-403 B.C.]

The state of Athens after the expulsion of the Thirty was in some respects apparently less desolate than that in which she had been left after the battle of Platæa. It is possible indeed that the invasions of Xerxes and Mardonius may have inflicted less injury on her territory than the methodical and lingering ravages of the Peloponnesians during the Decelean war. But in 479 the city, as well as the country, had been, for a part of two consecutive years, in the power of an irritated enemy. All that it required both for ornament and defence was to be raised afresh from the ground. Yet the treasury was empty: commerce had probably never yet yielded any considerable supplies, and it had been deeply disturbed by the war; the state possessed no dependent colonies or tributary allies, and was watched with a jealous eye by the most powerful of its confederates.

[403-402 B.C.]

Commerce had not only been interrupted by the blockade, but had sustained still greater detriment from the tyranny of the Thirty, which had crushed or scared away the most opulent and industrious of the aliens: and the cloud which continued to hang over the prospects of the state, even after freedom and tranquillity had been restored, tended to discourage those who might have been willing to return. The public distress was such that it was with the greatest difficulty the council could provide ways and means for the ordinary expenses. Even the ancient sacrifices prescribed by the sacred canons were intermitted, because the treasury could not furnish three talents [£600 or $8000] for their celebration: and the repayment of a loan of two talents which had been advanced by the Thebans, probably in aid of the exiles, was so long delayed through the same cause, that hostilities were threatened for the purpose of recovering the debt. The navy of Athens had now sunk to a fourth of that which she had maintained before the time of Solon, and it was limited to this footing by a compact which could not be broken or eluded without imminent danger; Piræus was again unfortified: the arsenal was in ruins: even the city walls needed repairs, which could not be undertaken for want of money; and on all sides were enemies who rejoiced in her humiliation, and were urged both by their passions and interests to prevent her from again lifting up her head.

Drinking Horns

The corruption of the Athenian courts of justice probably began with that great extension of their business which took place when the greater part of the allies had lost their independence and were compelled to resort to Athens for the determination of all important causes. At the same time the increase of wealth and the enlargement of commerce, multiplied the occasions of litigation at home. The taste of the people began to be more and more interested in forensic proceedings, even before it was attracted towards them by any other inducement. The pay of the jurors introduced by Pericles strengthened this impulse by a fresh motive, which, when Cleon had tripled its amount, acted more powerfully, and on a larger class. A considerable number of citizens then began to look to the exercise of their judicial functions as a regular source both of pleasure and profit.

Fortune

(After Hope)

But the prevalence of this frivolous habit was not the worst fault of the Athenian courts. In the most important class of cases, the criminal prosecutions, they were seldom perfectly impartial, and their ordinary bias was against the defendant. The juror in the discharge of his office did not forget his quality of citizen, and was not indifferent to the manner in which the issue of a trial might affect the public revenue, and thus he leaned towards decisions which replenished the treasury with confiscations and pecuniary penalties, while they also served to terrify and humble the wealthy class, which he viewed with jealousy and envy. On this notorious temper of the courts was grounded the power of the infamous sycophants who lived by extortion, and generally singled out, as the objects of their attacks, the opulent citizens of timid natures and quiet habits, who were both unable to plead for themselves, and shrank from a public appearance. Such persons might indeed procure the aid of an advocate, but they commonly thought it better to purchase the silence of the informer, than to expose themselves to the risk and the certain inconvenience of a trial. The resident aliens were not exempt from this annoyance; and, though they were not objects of fear or jealousy, they were placed under many disadvantages in a contest with an Athenian prosecutor. But the noble and affluent citizens of the subject states, above all, had reason to tremble at the thought of being summoned to Athens, to meet any of the charges which it was easy to devise against them, and to connect with an imputation of hostile designs or disloyal sentiments, and were ready to stop the mouths of the orators with gold.

There is no room for doubt as to the existence of the evils and vices we have been describing, though the most copious information we possess on the subject is drawn not from purely historical sources, but from the dramatic satires of Aristophanes. But there may still be a question as to the measure of allowance to be made for comic exaggeration, or political prejudices, in the poet; and it seems probable that the colours in which he has painted his countrymen are in some respects too dark. That the mass of the people had not sunk to this degree of depravity, may we think be inferred from the grief and indignation which it is recorded to have shown on some occasions, where it had been misled into an unjust sentence, by which it stained itself with innocent blood: as Callixenus, who however was not worse than other sycophants, though he was among those who returned after the expulsion of the Thirty, and enjoyed the benefit of the amnesty, died, universally hated, of hunger.

ARISTOPHANES

[ca. 425-400 B.C.]

The patriotism of Aristophanes was honest, bold, and generally wise. He was still below the age at which the law permitted a poet to contend for a dramatic prize, and was therefore compelled to use a borrowed name, when, in the year after the death of Pericles, he produced his first work, in which his chief aim seems to have been to exhibit the contrast between the ancient and the modern manners. In his next, his ridicule was pointed more at the defects or the perversion of political institutions, and perhaps at the democratical system of filling public offices by lot. In both, however, he had probably assailed many of the most conspicuous persons of the day, and either by personal satire, or by attacks on the abuses by which the demagogues throve, he provoked the hostility of Cleon, who endeavoured to crush him by a prosecution. Its nominal ground was, it seems, the allegation, that the poet, who in fact according to some accounts was of Dorian origin, was not legally entitled to the franchise. But the real charge was that in his recent comedy he had exposed the Athenian magistracy to the derision of the foreign spectators. Cleon, however, was baffled; and though the attempt was once or twice renewed, perhaps by other enemies of Aristophanes, it failed so entirely, that he seems to have been soon left in the unmolested enjoyment of public favour; and he not only was encouraged to revenge himself on Cleon by a new piece, in which the demagogue was exhibited in person, and was represented by the poet himself,—who it is said could not find an actor to undertake the part, nor even get a suitable mask made for it,—but he at the same time ventured on an experiment which it seems had never been tried before on the comic stage.

Aristophanes

The people had been accustomed to see the most eminent Athenian statesmen and generals brought forward there and placed in a ludicrous light; but it had never yet beheld its own image set before its eyes as in a mirror, which reflected the principal features of its character, not indeed without the exaggeration which belonged to the occasion, but yet with a truth which could not be mistaken or evaded. This was done in the same play which exposed Cleon’s impudence and rapacity; and the follies and faults of the assembled multitude, which appears under its proper name of Demos, as an old dotard, not void of cunning, though incapable of governing himself, are placed in the strongest relief by the presence of its unworthy favourite, who is introduced, not indeed by name, but so as to be immediately recognised, as a lying, thievish, greedy, fawning, Paphlagonian slave. The poet’s boldness was so far successful, that instead of offending the audience he gained the first prize: but in every other respect he failed of attaining his object; for Cleon, as we have seen, maintained his influence unimpaired to the end of his life, and the people showed as little disposition to reform its habits, and change its measures, as if the portrait it had seen of itself had been no less amiable than diverting. But the issue of this attempt did not deter him from another, which, but for the applause which had crowned the first, might have appeared equally dangerous. As in the Knights he had levelled his satire against the sovereign assembly; in the Wasps, which he exhibited in the year before Cleon’s death, he attacked the other stronghold of his power, the courts of justice, with still keener ridicule.

The vehicles in which Aristophanes conveyed his political lessons, strange as they appear to us, were probably judiciously chosen, as well with the view of pointing the attention of the audience more forcibly to his practical object, as of relieving the severity of his admonitions and censures. As time has spared only a few fragments of the earlier and the contemporary productions of the comic drama, it is only from the report of the ancient critics that we can form any notion of the relation in which he stood to his theatrical competitors. He is said not only to have introduced several improvements in the structure of the old political comedy, by which he brought it to its highest perfection, but to have tempered the bitterness and the grossness of his elder rival Cratinus, who is described as the comic Æschylus. It is not quite clear in what sense this account is to be understood, for it is difficult to conceive that the satire of Cratinus can have been either freer or more licentious. But the difference seems to have consisted in the inimitable grace with which Aristophanes handled every subject which he touched. We are informed, indeed, that even in this quality he was surpassed by Eupolis, who is also said to have shown more vigour of imagination in the invention of his plots. Yet another account represents Eupolis as more nearly resembling Cratinus in the violence and homeliness of his invectives; and the testimony of the philosopher Plato, who in an epitaph called the soul of Aristophanes a sanctuary of the Graces, studied his works as a model of style for the composition of his own dialogues, and honoured him with a place in one of his masterpieces, seems sufficient to prove that at least in the elegance of his taste, and the gracefulness of his humour, he had no equal.

How much Aristophanes was in earnest with his subject, how far he was from regarding it merely as an occasion for the exercise of his art, and how little he was swayed by personal prejudices, which have sometimes been imputed to him, is proved less by the keenness of his ridicule than by the warmth of his affection for Athens, which is manifest even under the comic mask. In his extant plays he nowhere intimates a wish for any change in the form of the Athenian institutions. He only deplores the corruption of the public spirit, points out its signs and causes, and assails the persons who minister to it. It is indeed the Athens of another age that he heartily loves; but that age is no remote antiquity; it is, if not within his own memory, near enough to be remembered by the elder part of his audience. He looks back indeed to the days of Miltiades and Aristides, as the period when the glory of Athens was at its height. But those of Myronides and Thucydides, the rival of Pericles, likewise belong, in his view, to the good old times, which he sighs for; and the evils of his own are of still more recent origin. He traces them to the measures of Pericles; to the position in which he had placed Athens with regard to the subject states, and above all to the war in which he had involved her.

The Peloponnesian War he treats as entirely the work of Pericles, and he chooses to ascribe it to his fears for his own safety, or to the influence of Aspasia; and to consider the quarrel with Megara as only the occasion or colour for it. The war he regards as the main foundation of the power of such demagogues as Cleon and Hyperbolus. If peace were only restored, he hopes that the mass of the people would return to its rural occupations and to its ancient tastes and habits; that the assembly and the courts of justice would no longer hold out the same attractions; that litigation would abate, and the trade of the sycophants decay. Cleon is reproached in the Knights with having caused the Spartan overtures to be rejected, because he knew that it was by the war he was enabled to plunder the subject cities, and that if the people were released from the confinement of the city walls, and once more to taste the blessings of peace and of a country life, he should no longer find it subservient to his ends. Hence we may perhaps conclude that when, at the end of the same play, Demos (the personified people) is introduced as newly risen out of a magic cauldron, restored to the vigour and comeliness of youth, in a garb and port worthy of the companion of Aristides and Miltiades, his eyes opened to his past errors, and with the purpose of correcting them, the poet did not conceive the change thus represented as hopeless, and still less meant to intimate that it was impossible.

It was not without reason that Aristophanes, in common with all Athenians who loved and regretted the ancient times, regarded the sophistical circles with abhorrence, not only as seminaries of demagogues and sycophants, but as schools of impiety and licentiousness. That the attention of the Athenian youth should be diverted from military and athletic exercises, from the sports of the field, and from the enjoyment of that leisure which had once been esteemed the most precious privilege of a Greek freeman, to sedentary studies, which at the best only inflated them with self-conceit, and stimulated them to lay aside the diffidence which befitted their age, and come forward prematurely in public, to exhibit their new acquirements and to supplant the elder and graver citizens on the bema, or to harass them before the popular tribunals: this in itself he deemed a great evil.

In the last scene of the Knights, one of the resolutions which Demos adopts is that he will bar the agora and the Pnyx against the beardless youths who now pass so much of their time in places of public resort, where they amuse themselves with discussing the merits of the orators in technical language, and will force them to go a-hunting, instead of making decrees. But it was a still more alarming evil, that, by way of preparation for this pernicious result, the religious belief of the young Athenians should be unsettled, their moral sentiments perverted, their reverence for the maxims and usages of antiquity extinguished; that subjects which had never before been contemplated but at an awful distance—the being and nature of the gods, the obligations arising from domestic and civil relations—should be submitted to close and irreverent inspection. It was according to the view of Aristophanes a matter of comparatively little moment, what turn such discussions happened to take, or what was the precise nature of the sophistical theories. The mischief was already done, when things so sacred had once been treated as subjects for inquiry and argument. But he perceived the evil much more clearly than the remedy. He would fain have carried his countrymen half a century backward, and have forced them to remain stationary at the stage which they had then reached in their intellectual progress; and it seems as if he wished to see the schools of the new philosophy forcibly suppressed, and with this view attempted to direct popular indignation against them. The only case in which this attempt succeeded was one in which the poet himself, if he had been better informed, must have desired it should fail.

EURIPIDES

Aristophanes closely watched all the workings of the sophistical spirit, and was sagacious enough to perceive that they were not confined to any particular sphere, but pervaded every province of thought and action. He was naturally led to observe its influence with peculiar attention in the branches of literature or art which were most nearly allied to his own. He was able to trace it in the innovations which had taken place in music and lyrical poetry, but above all in the tragic drama: and Euripides, the last of the three tragic poets who are known to us by their works, appeared to him as one of the most dangerous sophists, and was on this account among the foremost objects of his bitterest ridicule. The earnestness with which Aristophanes assailed him seems to have increased with the growth of his reputation; for of the three comedies in which he is introduced, the last, which was exhibited after his death, contains by far the most severe as well as elaborate censure of his poetry. It is not however quite certain that Euripides, even in the latter part of his career, was so popular as Sophocles. In answer to a question of Socrates, in a conversation which Xenophon probably heard during the latter part of the Peloponnesian War, Sophocles is mentioned as indisputably the most admirable in his art.

It has often been observed, that the success of Euripides, if it is measured by the prizes which he is said to have gained, would not seem to have been very great: and perhaps there may be reason to suspect, that he owed much of the applause which he obtained in his life-time to the favour of a party, which was strong rather in rank and fortune than in numbers; the same which is said to have been headed by Alcibiades, and to have deprived Aristophanes of the prize.

Alcibiades employed Euripides to celebrate his Olympic victories; and his patronage was sufficient to spread the poet’s fame at home and abroad. The anecdote about the celebrity which he had acquired in Sicily is perfectly consistent with this view; as is the invitation which he received a little before his death from Archelaus of Macedon, at whose court he ended his life; and the admiration which Dionysius of Syracuse expressed for him, by buying his tablets and pen at a high price, to dedicate them in the temple of the Muses.

Aristophanes was so far from being blind to the poetical merits of Euripides, that he was himself charged by his rivals with borrowing from him, and in one of his lost plays acknowledged that in his diction he had imitated the terseness of the tragic poet, but asserted that his thoughts were less vulgar. How accurately he had studied the works of the tragic drama, how vividly he perceived the genuine character of Greek tragedy, and the peculiar genius of each poet, is sufficiently proved by the mode in which he has conducted the contest which he feigns between Æschylus and Euripides. But his criticism would probably have been less severe, if he had not considered Euripides less in his poetical character than in his connection with the sophistical school. Euripides had in fact been a hearer of Anaxagoras, and probably both of Protagoras and Prodicus. In his house Protagoras was said to have read one of his works by which he incurred a charge of atheism. He was also on intimate terms with Socrates, who was therefore reported to have aided him in the composition of his tragedies, and perhaps may have done so, in the same way as Prodicus and Anaxagoras; and this connection was, as we shall see, of itself a sufficient ground with Aristophanes for suspicion and aversion. The strength of Euripides lay in passionate and moving scenes, and he sought like other poets for situations and characters which afforded the best opportunity for the display of his powers. But he was too frequently tempted to work upon the feelings of his audience by an exhibition of sufferings which were quite foreign to the heroic dignity of the persons who endured them, who were therefore degraded by the pity they excited. The misery of his heroes often consisted chiefly in bodily privations, which could only awaken the sympathy of the spectator’s animal nature.

His irreligion is contrasted with the piety of Æschylus, who invokes the goddess of the Eleusinian mysteries; a hint which, after the prosecution of Alcibiades, was easily understood, as to the party to which Euripides belonged. It was probably in the same point of view that Aristophanes considered the plays which he founded on tales of criminal passion.

Euripides was undoubtedly induced to select such subjects, some of which were new to the Greek stage, chiefly by the opportunity they afforded him of displaying his peculiar dramatic talent. But in his hands they seldom failed to give occasion for a sophistical defence of conduct repugnant to Greek usages and feelings, which to Aristophanes would appear much more pernicious than the example itself. But his plays were likewise interspersed with moral paradoxes, which in more than one instance are said to have excited the indignation of the audience. A line in which the most pious of his heroes distinguishes between the oath of the tongue and that of the mind, in terms which might serve to justify any perjury, became very celebrated, and Aristophanes dwells upon it, apparently as a striking illustration of the sophistical spirit. It seems clear that these, and others of the novelties just mentioned, cannot have been designed to gain the general applause of the audience. Though we must reject a story told by some of his Greek biographers, which indeed is at variance with chronology, that the fate of his master Anaxagoras deterred him from philosophical pursuits, and led him to turn his thoughts to the drama, we might still wonder at his indiscretion, if it had not appeared probable that he aimed at gratifying the taste, not so much of the multitude, as of that class of persons which took pleasure in the new learning, and was in fact the favourite poet, not so much of the common people, as of a party, which was growing more and more powerful throughout his dramatic career.

Euripides, however, occupies only a subordinate place among the disciples and supporters of the sophistical school, whom Aristophanes attacked. The person whom he selected as its representative, and on whom he endeavoured to throw the whole weight of the charges which he brought against it, was Socrates. In the Clouds, a comedy exhibited in 423, a year after the Knights had been received with so much applause, Socrates was brought on the stage under his own name, as the arch-sophist, the master of the free-thinking school. The story is of a young spendthrift, who has involved his father in debt by his passion for horses, and having been placed under the care of Socrates is enabled by his instructions to defraud his creditors, but also learns to regard filial obedience and respect, and piety to the gods, as groundless and antiquated prejudices; and it seems hardly possible to doubt that under this character the poet meant to represent Alcibiades, whom it perfectly suits in its general outline, and who may have been suggested to the thoughts of the spectators in many ways not now perceived by the reader. It seems at first sight as if in this work Aristophanes must stand convicted either of the foulest motives or of a gross mistake. For the character of Socrates was in most points directly opposed to the principles and practice which he attributes here and elsewhere to the sophists and their followers. Yet in the Clouds this excellent person appears in the most odious as well as ridiculous aspect; and the play ends with the preparations made by the father of the misguided youth to consume him and his school.[c]

Remains of a Temple at Metapontum

CHAPTER XXXIX. SOCRATES AND THE SOPHISTS

It was not till the superior talents of Pericles had quieted the storms of war and faction that science, which had in the interval received great improvement among the Asian Greeks, revived at Athens with new vigour. Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, the preceptor and friend of Pericles, bred in all the learning of the Ionian school, is said first to have introduced what might properly be called philosophy there. To him is attributed the first introduction in European Greece of the idea of one eternal, almighty, and all-good Being, or, as he is said, after Thales, to have expressed himself, a perfect mind, independent of body, as the cause or creator of all things. The gods received in Greece, of course, were low in his estimation; the sun and moon, commonly reputed divinities, he held to be mere material substances, the sun a globe of stone, the moon an earth, nearly similar to ours. A doctrine so repugnant to the system on which depended the estimation of all the festivals, processions, sacrifices, and oracles, which so fascinated the vulgar mind, was not likely to be propagated without reprehension. Even the science which enabled men to calculate an eclipse was offensive, inasmuch as it lowered the importance, and interfered with the profits, of priests, augurs, interpreters, and seers. An accusation of impiety was therefore instituted against Anaxagoras; the general voice went with the prosecutors; and all that the power and influence of Pericles could do for his valued friend, was to procure him means of escape from Attica.

But while physical and metaphysical speculation engaged men of leisure, other learning had more attraction for the ambitious and needy. Athens always was the great field for acquiring fame and profit in this line; yet those who first attained eminence in it were foreigners there, Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily, Prodicus of the little island of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis. All these are said to have acquired considerable riches by their profession. Their success invited numbers to follow their example; and Greece, but far more especially Athens, shortly abounded with those who, under the name of sophists, professors of wisdom, undertook to teach every science. The scarcity and dearness of books gave high value to that learning which a man with a well-stored mind, and a ready and clear elocution could communicate. None, without eloquence, could undertake to be instructors; so that the sophists, in giving lessons of eloquence, were themselves the example. They frequented all places of public resort, the agora, the public walks, the gymnasia, and the porticoes; where they recommended themselves to notice by an ostentatious display of their abilities, in disputation among one another, or with whoever would converse with them.

The profession of sophist had not long flourished, and no Athenian had acquired fame in any branch of philosophy, when the singular talents, and singular manners and pursuits, of Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, engaged public attention. The father was a statuary, and is not mentioned as very eminent in his profession; but, as a man, he seems to have been respected among the most eminent of the commonwealth: he lived in particular intimacy with Lysimachus, son of the great Aristides. Socrates, inheriting a very scanty fortune, had a mind wholly intent upon the acquisition and communication of knowledge. The sublime principles of theology, taught by Anaxagoras, made an early impression upon his mind. They led him to consider what should be the duty owed by man to such a Being as Anaxagoras described his Creator; and it struck him that, if the providence of God interfered in the government of this world, the duty of man to man, little considered by poets or priests as any way connected with religion, and hitherto almost totally neglected by philosophers, must be a principal branch of the duty of man to God. It struck him further that, with the gross defects which he saw in the religion, the morality, and the governments of Greece, though the favourite inquiries of the philosophers, concerning the nature of the Deity, the formation of the world, the laws of the heavenly bodies, might, while they amused, perhaps also enlarge and improve the minds of a few speculative men, yet the investigation of the social duties was infinitely more important, and might be infinitely more useful, to mankind in general. Endowed by nature with a most discriminating mind, and a singularly ready eloquence, he directed his utmost attention to that investigation; and when, by reflection, assisted and proved by conversation among the sophists and other able men, he had decided an opinion, he communicated it, not in the way of precept, which the fate of Anaxagoras had shown hazardous, but by proposing a question, and, in the course of interrogatory argument, leading his hearers to the just conclusion.

We are informed by his disciple Xenophon how he passed his time. He was always in public. Early in the morning he went to the walks and the gymnasia: when the agora filled, he was there; and, in the afternoon, wherever he could find most company. Generally he was the principal speaker. The liveliness of his manner made his conversation amusing as well as instructive, and he denied its advantages to nobody. But he was nevertheless a most patient hearer; and preferred being the hearer whenever others were present able and disposed to give valuable information to the company. He did not commonly refuse invitations, frequently received, to private entertainments; but he would undertake no private instruction, nor could any solicitation induce him to relieve his poverty by accepting, like the sophists and rhetoricians, a reward for what he gave in public.

In the variety of his communication on social duties he could not easily, and perhaps he did not desire entirely, to avoid either religious or political subjects; hazardous, both of them, under the jealous tyranny of democracy. It remains a question how far he was subject to superstition; but his honesty is so authenticated that it seems fairer to impute to him some weakness in credulity than any intention to deceive. If we may believe his own account, reported by his two principal disciples, he believed himself divinely impelled to the employment to which he devoted his life, inquiring and teaching the duty of man to man. A divine spirit, in his idea, constantly attended him; whose voice, distinctly heard, never expressly commanded what he was indisposed to do, but frequently forbade what he had intended. To unveil the nature of Deity was not among his pretensions. He only insisted on the perfect goodness and perfect wisdom of the Supreme God, the creator of all things, and the constant superintendence of his providence over the affairs of men. As included in these, he held that everything done, said, or merely wished by men, was known to the Deity, and that it was impossible he could be pleased with evil. The unity of God, though implied in many of his reported discourses, he would not in direct terms assert; rather carefully avoiding to dispute the existence of the multifarious gods acknowledged in Greece; but he strongly denied the weaknesses, vices, and crimes commonly imputed to them. Far however from proposing to innovate in forms of worship and religious ceremonies, so various in the different Grecian states, and sources of more doubt and contention than any other circumstances of the heathen religion, he held that men could not, in these matters, do wrong if they followed the laws of their own country and the institutions of their forefathers. He was therefore regular in sacrifice, both upon the public altars and in his family. He seems to have been persuaded that the Deity, by various signs, revealed the future to men; in oracles, dreams, and all the various ways usually acknowledged by those conversant in the reputed science of augury. “Where the wisdom of men cannot avail,” he said, “we should endeavour to gain information from the gods; who will not refuse intelligible signs to those to whom they are propitious.” Accordingly he consulted oracles himself, and he recommended the same practice to others, in every doubt on important concerns.

The circumstances of the Athenian government, in his time, could not invite a man of his disposition to offer himself for political situations. He thought he might be infinitely more useful to his country in the singular line, it might indeed be called a public line, which he had chosen for himself. Not only he would not solicit office, but he would take no part in political contest. In the several revolutions which occurred he was perfectly passive. But he would refuse nothing: on the contrary, he would be active in everything that he thought decidedly the duty of a citizen. When called upon to serve among the heavy-armed, he was exemplary in the duties of a private soldier; and as such he fought at Potidæa, Amphipolis, and Delium. We find him mentioned in civil office; at one time president of the general assembly, and at another a member of the council of Five Hundred. In each situation he distinguished himself by his unbending uprightness. When president, he resisted the violence of the assembled people, who voted a decree, in substance or in manner, contrary to the constitution. Neither entreaties nor threats could move him to give it the necessary sanction of his office. As a member of the council we have already seen him, in the office of prytanis, at the trial of the six generals, persevering in resistance to the injustice of popular tyranny, rendered useless through the want of equal constancy in his colleagues, who yielded to the storm. Under the Thirty again we have seen him, not in office indeed, but daring to refuse office, unworthy and illegal office, which the tyranny of the all-powerful Critias would have put upon him.

We are not informed when Socrates first became distinguished as a sophist; for in that description of men he was in his own day reckoned. When the wit of Aristophanes was directed against him in the theatre he was already among the most eminent, but his eminence seems to have been then recent. It was about the tenth or eleventh year of the Peloponnesian War, when he was six or seven and forty years of age, that, after the manner of the old comedy, he was offered to public derision upon the stage, by his own name, as one of the persons of the drama, in the comedy of Aristophanes, called the Clouds, which is yet extant. The audience, accustomed to look on defamation with carelessness, and to hold as lawful and proper whatever might amuse the multitude, applauded the wit, and even gave general approbation to the composition; but the high estimation of the character of Socrates sufficed to prevent that complete success which the poet had looked for. The crown, which rewarded him whose drama most earned the public favour, and which Aristophanes had so often won, was on this occasion refused him.

Two or three and twenty years had elapsed since the first representation of the Clouds; the storms of conquest suffered from a foreign enemy and from four revolutions in the civil government of the country, had passed; nearly three years had followed of that quiet which the revolution under Thrasybulus produced, and the act of amnesty should have confirmed, when a young man, named Meletus, went to the king-archon, delivered, in the usual form, an information against Socrates, and bound himself to prosecute. The information ran thus: “Meletus, son of Meletus, of the borough of Pitthos, declares these upon oath against Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, of the borough of Alopece: Socrates is guilty of reviling the gods whom the city acknowledges, and of preaching other new gods: moreover he is guilty of corrupting the youth. Penalty, death.”

Grecian Terra-cotta

(In the British Museum)

THE PROSECUTION OF SOCRATES

[399 B.C.]

Xenophon begins his Memorabilia of his revered master with declaring his wonder how the Athenians could have been persuaded to condemn to death a man of such uncommonly clear innocence and exalted worth. Ælianus, though for authority not to be compared with Xenophon, has nevertheless, we think, given the solution. “Socrates,” he says, “disliked the Athenian constitution. For he saw that democracy is tyrannical, and abounds with all the evils of absolute monarchy.” But though the political circumstances of the times made it necessary for contemporary writers to speak with caution, yet both Xenophon and Plato have declared enough to show that the assertion of Ælianus was well founded; and further proof, were it wanted, may be derived from another early writer, nearly contemporary, and deeply versed in the politics of his age, the orator Æschines. Indeed, though not stated in the indictment, yet it was urged against Socrates by his prosecutors before the court, that he was disaffected to the democracy; and in proof they affirmed it to be notorious that he had ridiculed what the Athenian constitution prescribed, the appointment to magistracy by lot. “Thus,” they said, “he taught his numerous followers, youths of the principal families of the city, to despise the established government, and to be turbulent and seditious; and his success had been seen in the conduct of two, the most eminent, Alcibiades and Critias. Even the best things he converted to these ill purposes: from the most esteemed poets, and particularly from Homer, he selected passages to enforce his anti-democratical principles.”

Socrates, it appears indeed, was not inclined to deny his disapprobation of the Athenian constitution. His defence itself, as it is reported by Plato, contains matter on which to found an accusation against him of disaffection to the sovereignty of the people, such as, under the jealous tyranny of the Athenian democracy, would sometimes subject a man to the penalties of high treason. “You well know,” he says, “Athenians, that, had I engaged in public business, I should long ago have perished, without procuring any advantage either to you or to myself. Let not the truth offend you: it is no peculiarity of your democracy, or of your national character; but wherever the people is sovereign, no man who shall dare honestly to oppose injustice, frequent and extravagant injustice, can avoid destruction.”

Without this proof indeed we might reasonably believe that, though Socrates was a good and faithful subject of the Athenian government, and would promote no sedition, no political violence, yet he could not like the Athenian constitution. He wished for wholesome changes by gentle means; and it seems even to have been a principal object of the labours to which he dedicated himself, to infuse principles into the rising generation that might bring about the desirable change insensibly. His scholars were chiefly sons of the wealthiest citizens, whose easy circumstances afforded leisure to attend him; and some of these, zealously adopting his tenets, others merely pleased with the ingenuity of his arguments and the liveliness of his manner, and desirous to emulate his triumphs over his opponents, were forward, after his example, to engage in disputation upon all the subjects on which he was accustomed to discourse. Thus employed and thus followed, though himself avoiding office and public business, those who governed or desired to govern the commonwealth through their influence among the many, might perhaps not unreasonably consider him as one who was, or might become, a formidable adversary; nor might it be difficult to excite popular jealousy against him.

Meletus, who stood forward as his principal accuser, was, according to Plato, not a man of any great consideration. He was soon joined by Lycon, one of the most powerful speakers of his time, and the avowed patron of the rhetoricians, who, as well as the poets, thought their interest injured by the moral philosopher’s doctrine. But Anytus, a man scarcely second to any in the commonwealth in rank and general estimation, who had held high command with reputation in the Peloponnesian War, and had been the principal associate of Thrasybulus in the war against the Thirty and the restoration of the democracy, declared himself a supporter of the prosecution. Nothing in the accusation could, by any known law of Athens, affect the life of the accused. In England no man would be put upon trial on so vague a charge: no grand jury would listen to it. But in Athens, if the party was strong enough, it signified little what was the law. When Lycon and Anytus came forward, Socrates saw that his condemnation was already decided.

By the course of his life, however, and by the turn of his thoughts for many years, he had so prepared himself for all events, that the probability of his condemnation, far from being alarming, was to him rather matter for rejoicing, as, at his age, a fortunate occurrence. Xenophon says that, by condescending to a little supplication, Socrates might easily have obtained his acquittal. It was usual for accused persons, when brought before the court, to bewail their apprehended lot, with tears to supplicate favour, and by exhibiting their children upon the bema, to endeavour to excite pity. No admonition or entreaty of his friends however could persuade him to such an unworthiness. He thought it, he said, more respectful to the court, as well as more becoming himself, to omit all this; however aware that their sentiments were likely so far to differ from his that judgment would be given in anger for it. Accordingly, when put upon his defence, he told the people that he did not plead for his own sake, but for theirs, wishing them to avoid the guilt of an unjust sentence.

Condemnation pronounced wrought no change upon him. He again addressed the court, declared his innocence of the matters laid against him, and observed that, even if every charge had been completely proved, still altogether did not, according to any known law, amount to a capital crime. “But,” in conclusion he said, “it is time to depart: I to die, you to live: but which for the greater good, God only knows.”

Socrates in Prison

It was usual at Athens for execution very soon to follow condemnation; commonly on the morrow. But it happened that the condemnation of Socrates took place on the eve of the day appointed for the sacred ceremony of crowning the galley which carried the annual offerings to the gods worshipped at Delos: and immemorial tradition forbade all executions till the sacred vessel’s return. Thus the death of Socrates was respited thirty days, while his friends had free access to him in the prison. During all that time he admirably supported his constancy. Means were concerted for his escape; the jailer was bribed, a vessel prepared, and a secure retreat in Thessaly provided. No arguments, no prayers could persuade him to use the opportunity. He had always taught the duty of obedience to the laws, and he would not furnish an example of the breach of it. To no purpose it was urged that he had been unjustly condemned: he had always held that wrong did not justify wrong. He waited with perfect composure the return of the sacred vessel, reasoned on the immortality of the soul, the advantage of virtue, the happiness derived from having made it through life his pursuit, and, with his friends about him, took the fatal cup, and died.

Writers who, after Xenophon and Plato, have related the death of Socrates, appear to have held themselves bound to vie with those who preceded them in giving pathos to the story. The purpose here has been rather to render it intelligible: to show its connection with the political history of Athens; to derive from it illustration of the political history. The magnanimity of Socrates, the principal factor of the pathos, surely deserves admiration; yet it is not that in which he has most outshone other men. The singular merit of Socrates lay in the purity and the usefulness of his manners and conversation; the clearness with which he saw, and the steadiness with which he practised, in a blind and corrupt age, all moral duties; the disinterestedness and the zeal with which he devoted himself to the benefit of others; and the enlarged and warm benevolence, whence his supreme and almost only pleasure seems to have consisted in doing good. The purity of Christian morality, little enough indeed seen in practice, nevertheless is become so familiar in theory that it passes almost for obvious, and even congenial to the human mind. Those only will justly estimate the merit of that near approach to it which Socrates made, who will take the pains to gather, as they may from the writings of his contemporaries and predecessors, how little conception was entertained of it before his time; how dull to a just moral sense the human mind has really been; how slow the progress in the investigation of moral duties, even where not only great pains have been taken, but the greatest abilities zealously employed; and, when discovered, how difficult it has been to establish them by proofs beyond controversy, or proofs even that should be generally admitted by the reason of men.

It is through the light which Socrates diffused by his doctrine enforced by his practice, with the advantage of having both the doctrine and the practice exhibited to highest advantage in the incomparable writings of disciples such as Plato and Xenophon, that his life forms an era in the history of Athens and of man.[b]

It is our great good fortune to possess a long and sympathetic description of the closing scenes of his life in the unsurpassed prose of his disciple Plato. Though told in the form of a dialogue and much too long for quotation in full, the presentation of Socrates is so vivid and veracious that a part of it must be given.[a]

PLATO’S ACCOUNT OF THE LAST HOURS OF SOCRATES

When we entered, we found Socrates just freed from his bonds, and Xantippe, you know her, holding his little boy and sitting by him. As soon as Xantippe saw us, she wept aloud and said such things as women usually do on such occasions, as “Socrates, your friends will now converse with you for the last time and you with them.” But Socrates, looking towards Crito, said, “Crito, let some one take her home.” Upon which some of Crito’s attendants led her away, wailing and beating herself.