VITHE MACEDONIAN WORLD

Plate LXXIX.CORINTHIAN CAPITALMansell & Co.

Plate LXXIX.CORINTHIAN CAPITAL

Mansell & Co.

you to be concerned about wealth or anything rather than virtue, punish them, I pray you, with the same affliction as that with which I have afflicted you, and if they pretend to be something when they are nothing, make it a reproach to them, as I have made it to you. If you will do that, we shall have received justice at your hands, I and my sons. Ah, I see it is now time for us all to go hence, me to my death, you to your life. But which of us is going on a better errand—that none can say, but only God alone.”

The dialogue of “Phædo” is perhaps the sublimest thing in literature. It purports to be the last discourse of Socrates to the friends who have come to share his last moments. He preaches the immortality of the soul, the unimportance of death, nay, the urgent necessity of that release from the hampering and deluding trammels of the body, if a philosopher is to see things as they are and enjoy the knowledge of reality. He puts it as a “myth,” using the current Greek mythology of Styx and Hades and Tartarus to enforce his doctrine of Hell, Paradise, and Purgatory. His friend Crito asks for instructions as to his burial.

“‘Bury me any way you like,’ answered Socrates, ‘if you get hold of me and I don’t escape you.’ He looked at us with a quiet smile and proceeded: ‘No, sirs, I can’t convince Crito that I am this Socrates who is now conversing with you. He thinks I am that one whom he will presently see dead, and he asks, if you please, how he is to bury me. I have been making a long speech to prove that when I have drunk the poison I shall not be with you any more, but shall have gone away to enjoy whatever blessings await the departed; only I am afraid it is all lost upon Crito, with all my consolations for myself and you. So you must be my sureties with Crito in a pledge just contrary to that which he gave to my judges. He went bail that I would remain here. You must go bail that I shall certainly not remain, but abscond and vanish. Then Crito will be less afflicted, and when he sees my body being burnt or buried he won’t grieve for me as if something unpleasant was happening to me, and he won’t say at the funeral that it is Socrates he is laying out or burying.’”

Then the story of his painful and courageous death is told in language of extraordinary simplicity and dignified restraint. “Such, Echecrates, was the last end of our companion, as we should say, the best, the wisest, and the justest man of all we had ever known.”

Socrates had done much towards giving Greek philosophy its new trend. The earlier philosophers had been chiefly concerned with the physical universe, trying to discover its origin, and thereby its “principle”; this had been apt to degenerate into that paltry inquisitiveness about mere phenomena which many people are still apt to dignify with the name of “natural science.” Socrates sought not so much the origin as the end of things; he made philosophy concern herself with the nature of reality, and incidentally with ethics and conduct.

The development of ideal philosophy may probably be ascribed, in the main, to Plato rather than Socrates. Perhaps the general English reader will find the simplest exposition of the Platonic theory of Ideas in Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” Put very briefly, it is that the material world apprehended by the human senses is only a copy or pale reflection of the realities “laid up in heaven.” The soul comes into this world

“Not in entire forgetfulnessAnd not in utter nakedness.”

We recognise the forms of things by their likeness to the patterns apprehended by the soul elsewhere. Thus, as Plato says in the “Meno,” all learning is a process of recollection. The words of St. Paul to the Corinthians are almost a verbal echo of this teaching of Socrates: “For now we see in a mirror darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.”

The doctrines of Plato about Love have been strangely perverted in the popular mind by a singular freak of language in the use of the word “platonic.” They are expounded in two very different dialogues, the almost boisterous “Symposium,”

Plate LXXX.FIVE TANAGRA STATUETTESMansell & Co.

Plate LXXX.FIVE TANAGRA STATUETTES

Mansell & Co.

where Socrates and his friends agree to diversify the drinking with a series of discourses on Love, and that most exquisite composition called the “Phædrus,” in which Socrates and his friend converse on the same topic as they lie in the shade of a spreading plane-tree upon the grassy banks of the Ilissus.

The human soul, coming from eternity into life, has not forgotten altogether “the sea of beauty” of which it had once enjoyed the vision. All beautiful things remind us of it, and (once more to quote Wordsworth):

“Hence in a season of calm weather,Though inland far we be,Our souls have sight of that immortal seaWhich brought us hither.”

Thus all men possess a natural yearning for beauty, however much their glimpses of it may have been darkened and distorted by their earthly experiences, and in their beloved they are seeing the reflection of the reality of beauty. The procreant impulse is part of man’s yearning for immortality; it is out of goodness and beauty that the immortal is to be begotten.

With Plato’s political views as expressed especially in the “Republic” we shall be able to deal more fully in the next chapter, when we come to consider the political theories which arose out of the conditions of the city-state. It is clear that in the hands of men like Socrates and Plato philosophy was usurping the place which according to our notions religion ought to occupy in the minds of men. Greek religion, or at least the official Olympian worship as defined by Homer, Hesiod, and the Tragic Poets, had never attained much influence over the morality of its worshippers. But now philosophy was definitely claiming to teach virtue. Not only sophists like Protagoras and Hippias, but even philosophers like Socrates and Plato, claimed to put right conduct on a basis of reason, and therefore of education. Hence followed the deplorable consequence that virtue was to be for the rich and well-born. Philosophy was snobbish from the start; it finished by excludingall but the select few from any chance of salvation, and, if it had had its way, would have excluded them from any political rights whatever. Socrates seldom discriminates between wise and learned, nor between wise and good. The strength of Greek philosophy is in its earnest opposition to materialism, its proper scorn of base, trivial, and temporary pursuits. But therewith it felt and inculcated a contempt of honest labour, and thereby it drifted farther and farther apart from practical life. For that, of course, the institution of slavery is largely responsible.

Plate LXXXI.BUST OF “SOCRATES”Mansell & Co.

Plate LXXXI.BUST OF “SOCRATES”

Mansell & Co.

εἴπερ ἴσην ῥώμην γνώμῃ, Δημόσθενες, εἶχεςοὔποτ’ ἂν Ἑλλήνων ἦρξεν Ἄρης Μακεδών.Plutarch.

THE fate of that old god Cronos, supplanted by his own children whom he had tried in vain to devour, is more or less the common lot of all parents of vigorous offspring. The Athenians had a nocturnal festival in which young men ran in relays, each member of the team handing his torch to another, and, as Æschylus says in a fine metaphor, “the first is the victor, even though he be last in the running.” So at this point of our history we begin to be aware of new forces arising in the Greek world, new powers on the fringe of the Hellenic circle now stepping into the light and taking their places in the torch-race of civilisation. Such were Rhodes, the new commercial republic, Caria under Mausolus, Thessaly under Jason, Cyprus under Evagoras, Pergamum under Attalus, the two Leagues, Ætolian and Achæan, and above all Macedon under Philip and Alexander. The stream of culture and intelligence that emanated from Athens and the other ancient cities was now pulsing in the finger-tips of Greece. Many of these new powers are more than half barbarian. They are either monarchies or confederations. What generally happens is that leaders arisewho are themselves sufficiently endowed with civilised intelligence to utilise the latent force in a race of untamed and uncivilised warriors. In the military sense the case is that the old powers had grown into the habit of replacing their citizen militias by paid professional soldiers, and their citizens accordingly had grown slack and unwarlike. Rulers like Philip of Macedon were able to raise much larger native levies and to drill them into the professional tactics of the day. Economically it was wealth that told. The old cities were, partly, no doubt through their own lack of foresight, in a state of financial exhaustion, while Philip, by his control of the gold-mines, Attalus and Evagoras by their private wealth, and the Phocians by their sacrilegious seizure of the treasures of Delphi, were still able to bring large forces into the field. The old powers were thus left behind in the race through the force of circumstances beyond their control. In fact, the day of the city-state seemed for a time to be drawing to a close, and larger units, either kingdoms or confederacies, to be taking its place according to their natural superiority.

Modern historians, therefore, suckled on Bismarckism and devoted to physical force, turn aside from the old cities and pronounce them hopelessly degenerate. This is a proposition that deserves examination. In some respects it is false. If it be the mark of historical decadence that the motive power of a race is in some mysterious way paralysed so that invention ceases and no more new forms or experiments are made in culture or politics, then we may assert with some confidence that Greece was not yet even in the third century in such a condition. We shall see something of her new inventions in literature, philosophy, and art in this chapter. In politics the federal systems of Western Greece were distinctly novel and promising. Even in warfare she fought bravely enough at Chæroneia, as she did much later against the invading Gauls. Even Athens, when her dark hour came and she had to submit to garrisons and alien governors, never acquiesced, but rose again and again in rebellion against them. Sparta for a shorttime in the third century performed the most difficult of all political feats, namely, a reformation and regeneration of herself from within. At Sellasia under Cleomenes III. in 222B.C.the few Spartans who remained fought against tremendous odds with all their ancient sublime devotion, and died to a man as their ancestors had done under Leonidas. So true is it that moral and spiritual qualities in a people do not come to the sudden end that often befalls a state when it depends for its greatness on material prosperity or physical force.

But the most serious symptom of later Greece was a real racial decline, for which history has no remedy and no mercy, a decline of population. The Spartiate race of Lacedæmon, for example, became almost extinct. There were no more than 1500 of them at the date of the battle of Leuctra, and after that we hear of expeditions containing no more that thirty genuine Spartiates. In a less degree it was the same all over old Greece, and whether it was due to malarial fever or to economic distress, it made the political decline of these states inevitable.

Now it is necessary to go back a little into the earlier part of the fourth century to glance at the rise of Macedon and its conquerors. At the opening of the century Macedon was still almost uncivilised; it was ruled by a monarchy surrounded with an aristocracy of knights very much after the Homeric model. At that time its kings had begun to acquire enough education to mingle a little in Greek politics, and Archelaus in particular had the good taste to invite Euripides and Agathon to his court. Philip II. obtained the throne by suppressing his young ward, the rightful king. At that time Macedon was overrun by wilder barbarians from the west, and it was long before Philip could make head against them. He did so at last by the organising genius which he displayed in remodelling his army, the astute statesmanship with which he made and broke treaties, and still more by the wealth he secured and the use he made of it in bribing his enemies. Philip was, in short, the organiser who occasionally precedes the conqueror and growsthe laurels for his successor to wear. Expansion to the west would be difficult and unprofitable. To the east lay the important cities of the Chalcidian peninsulas, the gold-mines of Mount Pangæus, protected by the city of Amphipolis, the rather decrepit kingdom of Thrace, and then the way was clear to the Black Sea and to Asia. Now this was the chosen field of commercial enterprise for Athens and her reviving fleets. A conflict was therefore inevitable.

The statesman who led the anti-Macedonian party at Athens was the orator Demosthenes. His brilliant series of Philippics and Olynthiac Orations are full of denunciations of the crafty monarch, full of trumpet-calls to the ancient valour of Athens which sometimes ring rather hollow to modern ears. Demosthenes was not exceptionally honest, but there is no warrant for suspecting the purity of his patriotism. He himself set the example of bearing a shield personally in the ranks, and he must have been conscious throughout his public career that he was in danger of assassination or of execution if the enemy triumphed. The wisdom of his opposition to Philip has also been questioned. Events were to prove that these Macedonian kings were not barbarians; on the contrary, their warmest aspiration was to be counted as Greeks, and they had, as they frequently testified, a great love of Greek culture and a deep veneration for Athens as the home of it. This the future was to prove; the present only showed a foreign monarch devouring piecemeal the markets of Athens in the north. Perhaps Demosthenes ought to have realised that Macedon was too strong for Athens, but no one could seriously expect old Greece to succumb to this upstart without a struggle. For one thing, Macedon had not and never acquired a really strong fleet. But her army was certainly irresistible.

Philip had learnt strategy at the feet of the Theban Epaminondas. The army he created included acorps d’éliteof noble horse-guards, the Companions of the King. These were the earliest first-rate mounted troops in history, and it was by their means that the dashing exploits of Alexanderwere subsequently achieved. For the infantry his great invention was the phalanx. This was clearly a modification of the deep formation invented by Epaminondas. It consisted of sixteen ranks armed with a spear 21 feet long. They stood in close order so that the points of the first five ranks projected from the front to present a bristling hedge of spears. The remaining eleven ranks, we are gravely informed, held their spears obliquely in the air to ward off missiles! Let the military reader find a military justification for this extraordinary arrangement. To me it seems a further confirmation of my civilian view that Greek tactics were primarily designed to prevent armies from running away. We observe that when Alexander took Persian troops into his phalanx he put twelve ranks of Persians into the lines, with a row of Macedoniansat their rear. In any case troops standing in close formation armed with weapons 7 yards long must have been useless for any but defensive purposes; and, as a matter of fact, the victories of Alexander were generally gained by the lightning charge of the king at the head of his knights.

We need not touch upon the shabby “Sacred Wars” which caused Philip to enter Greece on the invitation of Thebes. It was at Chæroneia in 338 that Philip defeated a mixed Greek army in whose ranks Demosthenes was fighting as a hoplite. Philip was generous to the Greeks, and especially to Athens. Next year the darling wish of his heart was obtained, for he was elected president of a Panhellenic union destined to fulfil his great scheme of avenging the Persian invasions of Greece by a march to Babylon. In the next year he was murdered, and his brilliant son Alexander cannot be acquitted of complicity in the crime.

The grand idea was Philip’s, begotten perhaps from the study of Isocrates, and certainly inspired by the examples of Xenophon and Agesilaus. Unfortunately it was far from arousing any enthusiasm in Greece. Persia was a long way off, and money could be had from the Great King without fighting for it. There was a sordid scramble for bribes among theGreek statesmen. As soon as they heard of Philip’s death they broke into unseemly jubilation, and voted compliments to his murderers; they hoped that things would return to their old routine, and that there would be no more talk of antediluvian crusades. They had reckoned without Alexander, for it is seldom that a Philip is succeeded by an Alexander.

This young man who conquered the world and died at the age of thirty-three has quite naturally captivated the imagination of posterity and formed a model for ambitious generals of later days. Julius Cæsar sighed to think of his inferiority in achievement. Augustus paid a visit to his tomb, and wore his portrait on a ring. Napoleon consciously imitated him. As a soldier he was not only an organiser of victory, though of course he owed a great deal to his father in this respect, and a strategist with an eye for a battlefield, but also a dashing cavalry leader, the sort of man to ride straight for the enemy’s king, to be the first in the breach, and to leap down alone into the enemy’s town. He did this sort of thing with impunity; he never lost a battle. He was chivalrous to ladies, Bayard and Bluebeard by turns. He married a beautiful Eastern princess called Roxana, he rode a beautiful war-horse called Bucephalus. If Lysippus and Apelles may be trusted, he had the face of a Greek god. He had just that touch of dissipation which somehow rounds off the conception of a popular hero. He had the good fortune to die young, in the hour of victory.

And what is to be the sober historian’s estimate of this dazzling person? We may minimise his triumphs by pointing out that the Persian empire was helpless before him, like ripe fruit waiting to be gathered. We may certainly charge him with conquering insanely without stopping to organise, and with neglecting his own kingdom and failing to deal adequately with the political condition of old Greece. We may point to the extraordinarily rapid collapse of his empire. But then he died suddenly in the midst of his work, and left no grown heir to succeed him. In some respects I think we must all admit that he showed very remarkable gifts of statesmanship. Though

Plate 82.—Alexander at Issus (Pompeii mosaic.)Brogi.

Plate 82.—Alexander at Issus (Pompeii mosaic.)

Brogi.

half a barbarian by origin, he was an enthusiast for Hellenism, and his plan was to spread it at the point of the spear all over the civilised world. When he destroyed Thebes he spared one house—the house of Pindar. It was as a missionary of Greek culture that he marched over the burning deserts of Asia. He took poets and artists in his train. He would stop his march every now and then to exhibit Greek athletics and Greek arts to the wondering Orientals. He planted Greek cities wherever he had time to stop, from Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile to Candahar (another version of his name). He had the art which makes a successful apostle, the gift of being all things to all men. In Egypt, the land of religion and mystery, he made a solemn pilgrimage into the desert, and got himself accepted as the son of the god called by the Greeks Ammon. In Persia he recognised the merits of the Persian provincial system, and appointed his own satraps, or even retained the existing ones. He treated Persian women with the deference to which they were accustomed, and added one to his household in the manner to which they were also accustomed. His Macedonians murmured at his Oriental dress and manners, but Alexander was always a Greek at heart, the lines of Homer always rang in his ears, and he fancied himself a reincarnation of Achilles pursuing his Phrygian Hectors over the dusty plains of Troy. He was mad, no doubt, to march so far over those weary deserts into Turkestan, through those dreadful defiles of the Hindu Khush. Only the mutiny of his army turned him back when he reached the farthest of the Five Rivers of the Punjaub. And then it was frantic lunacy to lead his army home along the burning coasts of the Persian Gulf. That experience taught him, it seems, a lesson which he might well have learnt earlier, namely, the value of sea-power for conquerors and empire-builders. When he died he was projecting a naval expedition along the coasts of Africa. The disaffection of Athens had deprived him of the fleet which ought to have belonged to a Panhellenic army, and Alexander had been forced to destroy the Persian fleet by a siege of its arsenal and headquarters, the island city of Tyre. Most conquerors have a touch of insanity, no doubt. The sanest of them is Julius Cæsar, and the maddest is Charles XII. But Alexander the Great had lucid intervals of consummate statesmanship. It is in this respect that he differs from the vulgar type of adventurer and stands among civilising conquerors like William the Norman with his Domesday Book, Napoleon with his Code, and Julius Cæsar with his Julian Laws and his calendar. This intellectual suppleness was the mark of Alexander’s Greek education, though it still remains a difficulty to trace in his career the influence of Aristotle, his tutor.

On his death at Babylon in 323 the whole empire flew to pieces. He had unwisely divided his veteran armies among his various generals, and each of them found himself established as the monarch of a large territory. Most of them naturally desired to emulate their master and secure as much of his empire as they could for themselves. Out of the confusing struggles of the next generation three great kingdoms gradually emerged: that of Macedonia, warlike and turbulent under various shortlived dynasties, that of Asia, huge and wealthy under a line of Seleucids, and that of Egypt under a long family of Ptolemies. All these kingdoms were mainly Greek. In the country, no doubt, Oriental life and language continued, but in the towns and for purposes of government both the language and the civilisation were Greek. Thus Alexander had done his work. He had actually added the whole of Asia Minor, Phœnicia, and Egypt to the Greek world. Curious traces of Hellenism are found even in distant India.

In this world of “the Successors,” as they are called, the ancient states of Greece are not altogether negligible. Rhodes continued to be free, rich, and happy. Athens, as I have remarked, was occasionally oppressed and sometimes enslaved by the Macedonian rulers to the north, but for the most part she continued as a free democracy, conducting her own affairs as vehemently as ever, though now, of course, as a second-class power. Sparta stood sullenly aloof, joining no confederacies,

Plate LXXXIII.“THE SARCOPHAGUS OF ALEXANDER” FROM SIDON: LION-HUNTSeban & Joaillier

Plate LXXXIII.“THE SARCOPHAGUS OF ALEXANDER” FROM SIDON: LION-HUNT

Seban & Joaillier

but dreadfully shrunken in population. I have alluded to her notable experiments at reform in the third century under Agis and Cleomenes. It was ended by the crushing defeat at Sellasia from the Achæan League and the Macedonians. Towns like Argos and Corinth preserved their liberties by joining the Leagues. Epirus was a new Power rising to fame by the same road as Macedon under an adventurous king called Pyrrhus. He unfortunately turned west instead of east in his search for worlds to conquer, and there met another rising power, a race of real soldiers who made short work of the Greek phalanx, even when supported by heavy cavalry in the form of Indian elephants. It was these Romans who, when they came in due course to return his visit, put “Finis” to this chapter of Greek history, and proceeded themselves to undertake the task of writing the next.

We have numerous works of art which portray Alexander the Great, and as he is said to have granted the sole right of depicting his royal form to Lysippus the sculptor, and to have commissioned Apelles as his royal painter, we may presume that most of the portraits go back to an original by one of these artists. We have enough description of the pictures by Apelles to show that he treated his model with all the obsequiousness of a court painter. There was Alexander in the guise of Zeus wielding the thunderbolt, Alexander in the company of Nike and the Heavenly Twins, Alexander leading the god of war in triumph, Alexander mounted on Bucephalus. The only relic which may give us an idea of the treatment of such subjects in pictorial art is a very fine mosaic floor at Pompeii.[107]It represents the conqueror charging bareheaded into the press of the Persian bodyguard at Issus, his greatest victory. You see Darius in his Oriental “mitre” anxious and terrified, just turning his chariot out of the battle. The scene is represented with great spirit, and Alexander’s face is happily preserved.The horses in particular are most faithfully rendered. As part of the mosaic depicts a Nile scene, with crocodiles, ibis, snakes, and a hippopotamus, we must infer that the original picture was made in Alexandria.

The same scene is depicted with greater brilliance on the famous sarcophagus from Sidon. On one side of it Alexander and Parmenio are fighting the Persians at Issus, and on the other side they are engaged in a lion hunt.[108]Few works of art can compare with this monument in magnificence or in historical interest. It is especially interesting in the history of art because it gives us the best example of the application of colour to sculpture, and completely justifies that process.[109]It also affords fine specimens of Greek mouldings and designs. The material is Pentelic marble imported from Athens. This sarcophagus is now in the museum at Constantinople.

Of the many busts and heads of Alexander, none gives us a very favourable example of the work of Lysippus. The so-called Dying Alexander is hideously strained and emotional. A head in the British Museum, however, is probably nearer to the original, though the very short upper lip and the heavy jaw make it a rather unpleasing portrait.[110]We are told that Lysippus alone was permitted to make portraits of Alexander, because “others desiring to represent the bend of his neck and the emotional glance of his eyes, failed to render his manly and leonine aspect.” It should be noted that Lysippus made a famous group of Alexander’s hunting, and another of Alexander’s troop of horse, so that the Constantinople reliefs may go back to Lysippean originals.

Alexander the Great. From a Coin of Thrace

Alexander was worshipped even in his lifetime as a god. He claimed, among other divine claims, to be a son of Ammon. In this character he is represented with the ram’s horns of that Egyptian deity on a coin of Thrace cast by Lysimachus, one of his generals and successors.

Plate 84. PORTION OF THE EASTERN FRIEZE OF THE SARCOPHAGUS OF ALEXANDER.

Alexander was the first of mortals to have his portrait on Greek coins, and it is only in virtue of the divine honours paid to him that this is conceded even to the conqueror of the world. Many of the later kings followed his example, and portraiture on the coins now becomes common.

In studying the early civilisation of Europe, which means the history of the Mediterranean peninsulas, one must not forget that economically Egypt is the key to the whole position. In natural resources it is far the richest country in that region. Hitherto, however, it had been shut off from the rest of the world by its own peculiar civilisation and religion, though the Greeks had occasionally borrowed ideas from it and sometimes interfered in its historical course. Now Alexander gives it a Greek government and a Greek capital. In order to crush the Phœnician fleet which had been the principal naval support of the Persian Empire, he had been compelled to destroy the city of Tyre. But it was more than a strategic move. He intended the commerce and sea-power of the Levant to be henceforth in Greek hands. He succeeded brilliantly in his purpose. Phœnicia passed away from the stage of history, and only survived in her great colony of Carthage.

The city of Alexandria was laid out on a mathematical plan by Greek architects. Its situation on the delta of the Nile was exceedingly favourable to commerce, especially as the difficult navigation of its waters was mitigated by the construction of a great lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. In the division of the empire Egypt had the good fortune to fall to the share of Ptolemy, a wise and enlightened ruler, as were most of his descendants of the same name. These all pursued a policy of commerce and peaceful expansion. There was brisk traffic between Alexandria, Rhodes, Pergamum, Athens, and Syracuse, and Alexandria grew to be the greatest city in the world. It was pre-eminently Greek, but tinctured also with some of the Orientalism of its environment.

Along with commerce the Ptolemies cultivated literature by founding a sort of university or college called the Museum. It consisted of a temple of the Muses, rooms for its members, a common dining-hall, cloistered walks for the peripatetic teacher, and above all of a magnificent library, for which the kings of Egypt made it their ambition to collect all the books in the world. Half a million MSS. were gathered there in the third century. The chief librarian was the master of the whole institution, which was a place of research and literary production rather than of education. At the same time Ptolemy made a point of attracting all the foremost literary men of the Greek world to his court. It cannot be denied that the Alexandrian culture was rich and vigorous. Great strides were made in science and mathematics, new and promising forms of literature were invented, but at the same time the sheltered air of the Museum tended to produce, as is inevitably the case with collegiate institutions, a rather frigid and academic type of work. At Alexandria, for instance, the first critics arose, and the first literary scholars, whose task was mainly to elucidate and comment upon the works of Homer. One of these scholars invented the Greek system of breathings and accents to help in the recital of verse. The most famous of all of them was Aristarchus, the Father of Criticism. In science and mathematics we must mention our old friend Euclid, who reigned in the hearts of schoolboys until the day before yesterday. Here worked Archimedes, the great engineer and founder of mechanics, statics, and dynamics. His researches in these directions remained unequalled until the seventeenth centuryanno Domini. Wondrous stories are told of his inventions and of his absent-mindedness. Once as he was entering the bath the overflowing of the water gave him a valuable scientific hint. He was so pleased that he forgot to dress, but ran home through the streets crying, “Heureka! Heureka!” At Alexandria, too, lived Eratosthenes, who first measured the circumference of the earth and worked out a system of chronology for history.

Plate LXXXV.ALEXANDER THE GREATMansell & Co.

Plate LXXXV.ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Mansell & Co.

There were many other historians of lesser repute at the Museum.

In poetry Alexandria is connected with some important developments, chiefly literary revivals of ancient modes. Thus Apollonius the Rhodian attempted to revive the epic, and wrote a long poem in hexameter verse on the Argonautic expedition of Jason. It is of course rather cold and formal, it is a long way from Homer, but it is of considerable merit in the field of poetry. Alexandria revived also the elegiac couplet, chiefly for short epigrams, some of which have the beauty and colour of a Greek gem. We may see for an example that epigram of Callimachus from which I have taken the couplet at the head of my Introduction, and which was so charmingly translated by William Johnson Cory. I quote another elegiac epigram of Meleager’s to show how modern in tone and subject these dainty lyrics had become in the first centuryB.C.:

“Poor foolish heart, I cried ‘Beware,’I vowed thou wouldst be captured,So fondly hovering round the snare,With thy false love enraptured.“I cried, and thou art caught at last,All vainly flutterest in the toils.Lord Love himself hath bound thee fastAnd meshed thy pinions in his coils.“And he hath set thee on his fire,In drugs thy swooning soul immersed,In stifling perfumes of desire,With scalding tears to quench thy thirst.”

“Poor foolish heart, I cried ‘Beware,’I vowed thou wouldst be captured,So fondly hovering round the snare,With thy false love enraptured.

“I cried, and thou art caught at last,All vainly flutterest in the toils.Lord Love himself hath bound thee fastAnd meshed thy pinions in his coils.

“And he hath set thee on his fire,In drugs thy swooning soul immersed,In stifling perfumes of desire,With scalding tears to quench thy thirst.”

So far it is mainly a record of revivals, but in Theocritus, who, though Sicilian by birth, passed most of his active career at Alexandria, we have the inventor of a new and most important branch of literature. With him pastoral poetry was a fresh and genuine creation. His Idylls are, as their name implies, a series of cameo pictures of shepherd life in Sicily. We have found no space here to speak of the later developments ofSicilian history, which in the fourth and third centuries became once more a desperate battleground between Carthaginian invaders and clever Syracusan tyrants like Dionysius and Agathocles. It is strange to think that the beautiful rustic life depicted by Theocritus could exist among the hills and glens of Sicily in spite of all the turmoil of history. Mr. Andrew Lang has completely vindicated Theocritus from the charge of artificiality by pointing out that the shepherds of modern Greece sing in language of refined and impassioned poetry that is perfectly natural and spontaneous. Large parts of the Idylls sound like quotations of such songs of Nature. Theocritus was, of course, the source of that pastoral convention which has produced so much that is artificial in art and literature amid much of supreme beauty. We think at once of Vergil, Spenser, Sidney, Milton, Watteau, and the Dresden shepherdess. Theocritus is the literary father of all these. In his famous Fifteenth Idyll, which describes with exquisite humour the conversation of a pair of Sicilian dames going to see a festival of Adonis at Alexandria, we have the beginnings of another literary form—the mime. This is a rudimentary style of drama which seeks to portray little genre scenes of life with no attempt at a plot. Herondas of Cos was the principal master of this art.

Two pupils of Theocritus were Bion and Moschus, both accomplished elegiac poets. Bion’s dirge for Daphnis and Moschus’ lament for Bion have provided the type for Vergil’s lament for Daphnis, for Milton’s “Lycidas,” for Shelley’s “Adonais,” and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis.”

In Alexandria, then, the Hellenic genius was as fruitful as ever. But it was growing under glass there, and it was not pure Occidental culture. We have to think of the Greek Ptolemies, descended from Macedonian generals, as on the one hand writing Greek poetry and inviting Greek scholars to criticise it, but on the other hand accepting homage and

Plate 86.—Relief from Pergamum.W. Titzenthaler, Photo. Berlin, W.

Plate 86.—Relief from Pergamum.

W. Titzenthaler, Photo. Berlin, W.

adulation as Eastern potentates, and actually marrying their sisters after the customary manner of Pharaohs. In Egypt Father Zeus took over the horns of Amen-Ra and became Zeus Ammon. Aphrodite, the foam-born goddess, assumed her Oriental nature once more and was mated with young Adonis in weird and lascivious Eastern ritual. Adonis was no Grecian youth, but a mystic personification of the spring, and his worshippers tore their hair and made lamentation for him with the same frenzy as made the priests of Carmel cut themselves with knives in honour of Baal. All over Asia Minor Hellenism had to mingle with Asiatic elements, losing in the contact all its fine austerity and sweet reasonableness. Hence was born the worship of Cybele, an Oriental Great Mother, with horrid mysteries performed by priestly eunuchs. Even the sculpture with which the wealthy Attalids adorned their great altar of Zeus at Pergamum, though Greek in plot and execution, is of almost Asiatic luxuriance and voluptuous beauty.[111]Passion and effort replace calm and dignity even as they do in the new Asiatic schools of oratory. Alexander’s violent battering at the gates which separate East from West had produced a strange hybrid in many of the cities of Eastern Greece.

But in some quarters the pure Greek spirit still produced lovely and reasonable work in art and literature alike. It seems to me impossible to think of degeneracy in connection with the Aphrodite of Melos, known to the public as the Venus of Milo.[112]If she has the charm and suavity of Praxiteles, she has the dignity and breadth of Pheidias. Unless you follow the pedants who make some point of the arrangement of her drapery, there is not a trait of vulgarity in her aspect. No doubt if we had the original Lady of Cnidos we should know better, but at present this superb statue rightly stands as the embodiment of feminine loveliness in statuary. And yet all the archæological indications go to prove that her author lived at the very end of the second century in the Asiatic city of Antioch, on the Mæander. She was found in a cavern on thelittle island of Melos, hidden there by who knows what devout worshipper or terrified pirate? She is, in fact, surrounded with mystery. No one has succeeded in restoring her missing arms, though far the most plausible theory is that which would make her hold a shield for a mirror in the same manner as the Victory of Brescia. No one has found anything else in Greek sculpture which could belong to the same artist, or even to the same phase of art. I name her here only to prove that you cannot fairly close the history of Greek art with Praxiteles or any other named sculptors, seeing that an unnamed artist living two centuries later could produce a statue on the same plane of excellence.

One of the most interesting figures among the warriors who followed Alexander was Demetrius, the Besieger of Cities, who gained his title from a celebrated but unsuccessful siege of Rhodes. He gained the kingdom of Macedonia and enslaved Athens. In celebration of a naval victory gained by him in 306 B.C. he set up at Samothrace a wonderful statue of Victory standing on the prow of a warship.[113]Her wings are outspread, her drapery is blown back by the wind, she is all life and motion. Along with the Venus of Milo she is the chief glory of the sculpture galleries in the Louvre. The reader should compare her with that earlier Victory fashioned by Pæonius. He will see that her drapery is much richer and the whole conception far more sensational. Both are very beautiful statues, but a pure taste will probably prefer the earlier one.

In all this period the dear city of Pallas had not suffered any material change. She had lost most of her colonies and maritime possessions, and in external politics she was but a pawn among the kings of Macedon and Egypt. But for the most part she remained a free democracy, governed by her free Assembly. The Peiræus still remained an important centre of commerce. Intellectually Athens still ruled the world not only in virtue of her past achievements, but by the continuing pre-eminence of her philosophers. Her principal literary product

Plate LXXXVII.APHRODITE OF MELOS [VENUS OF MILO

Alinari]

of these days was the New Comedy of Menander and his school. Menander’s work was taken over bodily by the Roman poets Plautus and Terence, who did little more than translate his comedies into Latin, and sometimes weave two of them together into one play, a process known by the not inappropriate technical name “contamination.” From the Roman comedians they passed almost direct to the Elizabethan age, so that in the history of the drama Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” begins almost where Menander left off. It must be confessed that the large fragments of Menander recently discovered do not raise our estimate of this dramatist.

If we turn now to philosophy we find the great name of Aristotle overshadowing everything else.[114]If we have a true sense of historical proportion, we shall probably admit that the words of Aristotle have conquered the world in far truer sense than the spears of his great pupil. For Aristotle is the father of the inductive method, the patron saint of all those who observe and verify facts in order to discover the laws that control them. He was born at Stagira, in Thrace, but he came to Athens to be a disciple in the Academy, that pleasant olive-grove where Plato was the master. Twenty years he spent thus in study, and then he was commissioned by Philip to teach Alexander and other noble youths of Macedon. As soon as this task was completed he returned to Athens, and there founded his famous Peripatetic school of philosophy, so called because his lectures were delivered in the shady walks that surrounded the Lyceum. In the morning he would discuss abstruse questions with an inner circle of adepts, and in the cool of the evening deliver polished lectures to a wider circle. The fame of his teaching was spread throughout the world, and all the ablest intellects of Greece gathered to hear him. All his life he received the most generous support from Alexander, who made a point of collecting strange beasts from all quarters to enrich his zoological studies. The attitude of the monarch towards learning was in striking contrast to thebehaviour of the Athenian democracy. Some wretched hierophant instituted a prosecution for impiety against Aristotle, just as they had done against Socrates, and forced him to withdraw from Athens for the closing years of his life.

Aristotle took all knowledge as his province and proceeded to map it out for further investigation. It is impossible even to enumerate all his extant writings here, and they are only a small part of what he wrote. For scientific method he wrote on Logic and Dialectic, and here he was the discoverer of the syllogism and distinguished the inductive and deductive methods of reasoning. For literature he dissected Poetry and Rhetoric, laying down principles which all subsequent critics have been compelled to follow. In his Ethics he defines the nature of virtue in a sense that is truly Hellenic. Virtues are the mean between two vices. Thus liberality is the virtue of which prodigality and parsimony are the extremes; courage is the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice. For Natural Science he wrote the first treatise on zoology, enumerating about 500 different species. It was the first time in the history of the world when men had thought it worth while to observe the world around them. Most of this scientific work was beyond the reach of mankind, and remained so for two thousand years. The Romans studied him, but scarcely advanced a step. In the Dark Ages Europe lost even the power to follow him, and much of his teaching was recovered from the wise men of Arabia. The mediæval schoolmen were content with abridged translations for their scientific knowledge. It was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that Europe came again to be able to study and understand him. In the seventeenth and eighteenth men like Bacon and Newton began to make some advance. Even now he is our master in Logic, in Criticism, and above all in Politics.

Plato had treated Political Science in three great dialogues, the greatest of which is “The Republic.” The ostensible object of this work is to define the nature of Justice, and in order to do so Socrates and his friends set out to construct an

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