CHAPTER XXIV
‘You all did see that on the LupercalI thrice presented him a kingly crown,Which he did thrice refuse: was that ambition?’Julius Cæsar.
‘You all did see that on the LupercalI thrice presented him a kingly crown,Which he did thrice refuse: was that ambition?’Julius Cæsar.
‘You all did see that on the LupercalI thrice presented him a kingly crown,Which he did thrice refuse: was that ambition?’Julius Cæsar.
‘You all did see that on the LupercalI thrice presented him a kingly crown,Which he did thrice refuse: was that ambition?’Julius Cæsar.
‘You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was that ambition?’
Julius Cæsar.
Thefriends who had known the strategos in old days thought that he would, for some time at least, enjoy his hard-earned rest, and spend his time in such pursuits as they knew he loved, and take his fill of the intellectual and sensuous delights of Athens.
On the day after the joyous one we have just witnessed he began his work as sole absolute general of the state. There was plenty of work to do. Athenian citizens had grown disheartened, and become lax in military discipline. He began by making all those who could bear arms, from boys of fifteen to men of sixty, meet every day for warlike exercise. He instituted a series of alarms, on hearing which, at any hour of the day or night, everyone seized his arms, and ran to his appointed post. Besides superintending these exercises himself,and providing that the ordinary soldiers of all classes were duly furnished with all things necessary for their duties, he raised the knights, to which order he belonged, to the highest point of excellence, making them complete in their own peculiar drill, and teaching them other exercises which he had learnt in Thrace and Persia.
He obtained one hundred new triremes from the state, provided chiefly by the spoils and tribute that he had brought with him from the Asiatic cities. While half the day was taken up with the land forces and the land defences, the other half he spent on the water, attending to the drilling of the sailors and the rowers at their work. No one was ever more severe or strict in details, especially as regarded the watchfulness that he required from the sentinels, and if some of the lazier or more stubborn of his soldiers did sometimes complain among themselves, no general was ever more implicitly obeyed. Not a murmur was heard openly against his exacting, self-denying, necessary discipline through all the three months spent in this laborious business. The heart of the people seemed changed; or, rather, the old heart which had beat so firmly when Miltiades led them, was renewed within them. Their pleasures were postponed. They recognised that this was not a time to indulge themselvesin their usual favourite amusements. Even the comic playwright, who made fun of everything and everyone on all occasions, grew almost serious at this time.
At the end of three months Athens possessed a compact array of troops such as it had never had before. The huge fleet, with its complement of sailors, perfectly equipped, lay in the port, ready at the given signal to raise anchor and set sail. But the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries was near, and the general put off the departure of his forces till after they, with all the other citizens, had taken part in this great festival. Messengers, for the first time for years, were sent through the neighbouring states, to announce the approach of the festival, so that all might attend who wished to be present at, or take part in, the games which followed.
It is impossible for us to realize the full importance of these sacred rites. Founded originally on the universal sense of helplessness in man, his dependence on the mysterious powers of Nature which, unmoved by him, yield him his sustenance in life, and on his belief in a Divine sustaining power when the strength of life is failing him—and thus based upon his dependence on food in life and on God in death, the Eleusinian mysteriesgrew out of the poetic mysticism of the earliest religious reverence.
The corn seed buried in the earth is represented by Persephone, who, while gathering flowers in a vale, ‘herself of gloomy Dis was gathered.’ Carried by him beneath the earth, she became wife of the King of Hades, and queen of the region of the dead. But Demeter, her mother, in frantic grief, after wandering through the world, came to Eleusis, and dwelt there, while the earth, in sympathy with her, withheld its fruits. The race of man was about to perish for want of food, when Zeus, in pity of its helpless misery, allowed Persephone to return to the earth and spend six months of every year with her fond mother;—a legend symbolic of the happy springing up of the new corn and of the joyful harvest.
Thus, the religious instinct of man to pay worship and devotion to the giver of his earthly sustenance became mingled with the devotion, no less natural to him, by which he sought to be sustained and strengthened after death by the powerful goddess of the regions of the dead. Much of the religion of the Athenian Greeks centred round this myth, and the later additions to it. The greater mysteries, which only the initiated knew, or could assist in celebrating, took the place withthem of the religious exercises and devotions and dogmas of a later age.
On the first day the initiated gathered together at Eleusis. On the second they made long symbolical ablutions, as if to free themselves from every taint of sin. On the third day they offered sacrifices, as some small return to the divine mother and her child, who gives to helpless men the necessary fruits of earth, and a recognition of their dependence upon her bounty. On the fourth and fifth days other rites were celebrated, which were not to be divulged; and on the sixth, the greatest day of all, the citizens set out from Athens to accompany the wondrous little statue of Iakchos, a son of Demeter, in pompous march from Athens to Eleusis.
This was an addition to the earlier, simpler mysteries, and had been imported from the East, or perhaps from Krete. Iakchos was really the infant Bakchos, representing the generative power of nature, as well as the stimulating force of wine, and was an introduction of a later time, when men were not content with the purer celebration of the innocent harvest of the corn-fields, with the bread and honey of their fathers, but must have wine from the grape-juice too.
During the seven years that the Lakedaimoniangarrison occupied the fort of Dekeleia, and ravaged the lands of Attika, it had not been safe to go beyond the city gates. Even the initiated dared not approach the sacred spot by the customary road. Some, indeed, had gone by sea, but for the most part the maimed rites, for these years, were but scantily attended. The sixth day’s solemn procession, the great event of the whole festival, had been abandoned altogether.
Alkibiades determined to restore the festival to its wonted grandeur. So the ‘spodophoroi,’ the sacred heralds, were sent out to announce the coming celebration, as of old, defying the Spartans to interfere or stop them. When the time arrived, he posted his hoplites all along the sacred way, and through the mystic defile, and the valley of Eleusis. Thus, the initiated could repair this year, as of old, to the first five days’ performance of the holy rites.
On the sixth day, at the head of his cavalry, the Strategos Autokrator marched from the foot of the Akropolis through the Agora, and, passing on his right the new temple of Theseus, took up his station at the outer Keramik gate, at the entrance of the sacred road, there to await the coming of the priests and people. Presently the procession, headed by the priests bearing the holy image, wasseen slowly wending its way towards them. Then all along the sacred route, lined and defended by his soldiers, the general, on his white Thrakian charger, and in resplendent armour, led the way. The people of all ranks, following the priests, made the air resound with their ecstatic cries of ‘Iakchos! Iakchos!’ The long road was flanked by tombs and altars of the great departed, carrying men’s thoughts back to the immemorial past, the heroic mythic times; and here many of his renowned ancestors lay, objects still of reverence and veneration.
At three points on the road the river Kephisos was crossed by bridges. At each of these the bearers of the hierarchic image stopped to do the customary rites. Thence they entered the mysterious defile which, by degrees, opened into the pleasant valley of Eleusis. The hills on either side echoed to the constantly repeated cries, ‘Iakchos! Iakchos!’ till the Eleusinian plain spread out before them, rich and lovely, bathed by the blue sea on the left, the Eleusinian mountains skirting it upon the right; and straight ahead of them, its white marble walls glittering against the setting sun, shone the Akropolis of Eleusis and the temples of the goddesses.
Imposing as the procession was at all times from its numbers and from the wild devotion of those who formed it, it was trebly so on this occasion fromthe added spectacle of the strong, silent soldiers who lined the way, and the splendid cavalcade of knights who went before and followed in the rear of it, and from the recollection of the seven past melancholy years, when the multitude had kept mournfully at home, fearing to go to offer their observances to the great goddesses until the saviour of the city had returned to make that possible. It seemed as if he on this day was the high-priest of Demeter, as well as their chief general. The dreaded Spartan king, while he was there, kept prudently behind his walls, nor dared, for all his power, to show himself, or seek to interrupt them.
Though they had started at mid-day, so much time was taken up in the various observances along the way that the September sun had sunk behind the Akropolis long before they reached Eleusis. As the night grew dark, torches were lit one by one. The light handed on from one torch to another gave a weird look to the great throng, until the whole mass was lighted up; and thus, with wild waving of the torches, amid a blaze of light, and with cries and chants to Iakchos, ever growing louder and more wild, they reached the holy temple. So passed the festival beneath the ægis of Alkibiades; and on the last day of the proceedings,when the games were held, the gathering was attended, as of old, by the famous athletes of Greece, who came to strive for prizes and to behold the invincible Athenian. He had a twofold object in waiting for the festival. If the Spartans had come out of Dekeleia, which was not more than fifteen miles from the sacred way, he would have found an opportunity of meeting his old opponent Agis; if, as the event proved, the Spartan feared to meet him, the power which compelled such enemies to keep themselves shut up within their fortress would be made manifest.
His popularity with the mass of the Athenians had reached what might have seemed its highest point even before this; afterwards it became something like idolatry. This free people forgot even their love of liberty in their fanatic zeal to show fresh proofs of their blind confidence in him. Only religious fervour, warmed by the recent worship of the goddess, and worked up by ceremonial observances and strange, half-maddening rites within the temple, can explain the step which a large number of them were prepared to take.
To gain a faint conception of what these religious feelings were we must, as far as possible, put ourselves in the place of the initiated, and of those who were about to go through the process of initiation—almostthe sole religious teaching of the age, the guide which taught them how to obtain the blessings of well-being here, and of an eternity of peace and happiness in the Elysian regions after death.
Added to this religious zeal, felt more especially among the less cultured classes, there was the patriotic gratitude of nearly all. Most of the more educated had felt for some time that a change must be made in the institutions of the state, if she was to combat successfully against the oligarchic and despotic enemies gathering around her, who had not the disadvantage of the unstable and variable policy incident to government by the voices of the masses.
Certain it is that, seizing the opportunity offered by the present feeling of the population, the numberless clubs which honeycombed Athenian politics, and represented the majority of those citizens who took the chief part in the affairs of state, came forward, and urged Alkibiades to suppress the constitution, to banish the demagogues and the orators, who, they declared, had been the constant cause of all their troubles, and suggested that he who was already autocrat in war, master of the forces by land and sea, both in and out of Athens, and feared by the whole of Greece, should accept from them a kingly crown.