VTHE FOURTH CENTURY

Plate LIX.THE MOURNING ATHENAEnglish Photo Co., Athens

Plate LIX.THE MOURNING ATHENA

English Photo Co., Athens

Death. Solon’s old laws attempt to limit funeral displays. The Spartan system was very rigorous on the point, and there the women were held in such discipline that the death of a warrior on the field of battle was sometimes even actually received with patriotic rejoicing by the women of his family.

Our archæological museums are much indebted to the practice of burying with the deceased the objects of his use in life. An athlete would have the strigil, with which he scraped off the dust and oil of the arena, buried in his tomb; a lady would have her mirror, in its chiselled copper case, or her “pyxis” (jewel-box).[72]Most of the little terra-cotta figures in our museums come from the tombs. Some of them were children’s toys: often the figures seem to have been deliberately broken before interment. Among the most beautiful of such relics of the tomb are the funeral oil-jars, or lecythi, of the fifth and early fourth centuries. They were specially painted for the purpose, as we can perceive by their choice of funereal subjects, and they are of a distinct type of pottery. The usual vase technique of the best period has its background painted with a rich black glaze and its figures left plain in the natural colour of the terra-cotta.[73]But these funeral lecythi have the body of the vase covered with a slip of white or cream colour, and upon it the figures and scenes are painted in polychrome. In this way we have surviving very rare and beautiful effects of colour-drawing in this the noblest period of Greek art. The work of the great artists Polygnotus and Zeuxis has, of course, perished utterly, and we must rely on these little oil-jars, probably the work of quite obscure craftsmen, for our nearest representation of it.[74]Here again we are amazed at the effect produced by simple means. Even where the colours have faded we trace a delicacy and precision of line in the drawing which is simply astonishing. No artists have ever done so much with a single stroke of the brush. It implies a wonderful confidence and mastery of technique.

Our museums also contain a great number of the marble slabs, decorated in high relief, which formed the ordinary tombstone of the Athenians buried in the cemetery of Cerameikos, outside the Dipylon Gate at Athens. A few of them are stillin situ, and present a remarkable picture as they stand. One of the most famous is the tomb of Hegeso, in the Athenian Museum. But there are a great many more, less known but equally beautiful, both there and elsewhere. None of them are, so far as we know, the work of named artists. The great works constructed under Pericles and Pheidias on the Acropolis must have collected dozens of competent minor craftsmen to Athens, and given them a noble training in their craft. Some show the round contours and delicate drapery of the Pheidian style, some the heavy muscularity of Polycleitus, and some show the small, finely poised heads of the school of Lysippus.

The subjects represented on the lecythi generally depict some part of the funeral rites, and the sepulchral slabs generally exhibit a scene of departure, which is always treated with extraordinary dignity and reserve. Not a lamentation is uttered, not a tear falls. Perhaps the gaze of our athlete’s father is more searching and intense than if it were a mere earthly separation from his stalwart son. There is, I think, no portraiture even here. If it is a woman who has gone to her long home, she is sometimes shown putting away her jewels for the journey. On one archaic relief now at Rome, a mother, with a smile upon her face, is placing her child on the knees of Persephone. A very beautiful one, also at Rome, bears the mythological scene of the parting between those types of married love and constancy, Orpheus and Eurydice. The head of Orpheus is bent a little, but Eurydice is smiling farewell, and the hand of Hermes, the Escort of Souls, is very light upon her wrist.[75]Most typical of all, perhaps, is the Mourning Athena,[76]which was probably a public memorial of soldiers fallen in the wars, since it was found built into a wall on the

FIG. 1FIG. 2Plate LX.TWO TOMBSTONE RELIEFS, FROM THE CERAMEIKOS, ATHENS

Plate LX.TWO TOMBSTONE RELIEFS, FROM THE CERAMEIKOS, ATHENS

Acropolis. It is strangely simple and restrained. The goddess, clad in her helmet, leans upon her spear, with head bent down, to read the names once painted on a short pillar which is part of the relief. The severe lines of her drapery indicate the austerity of the unknown artist’s treatment of his patriotic theme. This is the speech of Pericles in stone. I have chosen also two less-known monuments from the Athenian Museum to show the Athenian view of death more clearly. The dead hero does not mourn, but his humbler friends, like the Giants and Barbarians of the friezes, may express their emotion visibly and indecently. Young men nearly always have their hounds to accompany them upon their tombstones. They are big animals, perhaps of the famed Molossian breed, akin to our pointers. Their descendants may be seen (and felt, unless the traveller knows the local artifice of sitting down and pretending not to be afraid) on any upland farm in Greece to-day. Girls are often accompanied by small pet dogs, curly and excitable. The big hounds clearly show dejection in every line.[77]Commentators tell us that the cat (Felis domesticus) was not kept as a pet in Greece, but that when the ancient writers talk of the “wavy-tail” who catches mice they mean the weasel. Would any one but a commentator keep a weasel for a pet? And what is that headless animal upon the shelf, if not the primeval cat imported from Egypt? The young man in this relief[78]is letting his doves go free. And, as you see, the little slave-boys may look sorry when their masters go. They are not Greeks; they may express human emotions.

But Greece and her foundations areBuilt below the tide of war,Throned on the crystalline seaOf thought and its eternity.Shelley.

THE pre-eminence of Thucydides among Greek historians has, I venture to think, somewhat distorted the true perspective of Greek history. The absorbing interest with which we follow his account of the Peloponnesian War to its close in the downfall of Athens leads us to regard all the rest of Greek history with that slackening of interest with which we commonly regard a sequel. The truth is that Athens rose from her knees after an interval, much chastened, considerably exhausted, certainly poorer, but with as much intellectual vigour and power of artistic creation as before. The Athens that we know intimately is the Athens of the Restoration. Really we know almost nothing of fifth-century Athens but her external politics and the remains of her monuments. The restored Athens is the city of Plato, of Demosthenes, and of Praxiteles. She has still to be the mother of philosophy, ethics, oratory, political science, comedy of manners, logic, grammar, and the essay and the dialogue as forms of literature. This is the only Athens which we know at all intimately from within.

Fig. 1.—Apollo Sauroctonos.Fig. 2.—The Cnidian Aphrodite.Plate 61.

Plate 61.

The Long Walls were to be pulled down in order that Athens might be separated from her harbours and become in fact an inland city like Sparta herself. Down they came to the music of flutes, and Athens consented to become the “ally” (euphemism for “humble servant”) of Sparta. The moral of it all for imperial cities would seem to be: (1) the precarious nature of sea-power unless backed very strongly by purse-power; (2) the danger of having unwilling allies or dependents; and (3) the impossibility of conducting war by means of public debate in a democratic assembly. On two occasions near the end of the war and the century the Athenians had tried experiments in constitutional revolution. For, indeed, during the closing stages of the war even the citizens of Athens could see, what was painfully obvious to the rest of the world, that she was not well governed for the purposes of external politics. Popular institutions exist for the sake of popular liberties. There are better ways of maintaining order, if that is your prime object, and much better ways of securing “efficiency.” Democracy may “reign”; it cannot “govern”—not, at any rate, without the help of a trained bureaucracy. Above all, in the conduct of a war a meeting of citizens in the market-place is the clumsiest deliberative body that can be conceived. We have seen how ignorant they were when they embarked on the Sicilian expedition without knowing anything more than interested parties chose to tell them of the resources of their allies and the disposition of the other Sicilian Greeks. Besides ignorance, they had shown hasty passion in condemning the whole male population of Mitylene to death; they had been ferociously unjust in sentencing their admirals to death for not stopping to pick up the shipwrecked survivors after the victory of Arginusæ. They had made childish blunders in strategy, as when they chose three hostile generals to conduct the Sicilian expedition, and in statecraft when they refused peace and drove their cleverest citizen, Alcibiades, over to the side of the enemy. But the most effective argument of the oligarchic party was based on finance. With the cessationof the tribute from the allies it became simply impossible to maintain the host of state functionaries which democracy developed and demanded. Further, democracy was, as we have seen, identified with anti-Spartan policy; Sparta would make no terms with democracy. And, lastly, when the brilliant Alcibiades had been banished by the democracy, he professed to have the Persian satrap, the universal paymaster, in his pocket, and he demanded a revolution as the price of his return. Such were the arguments insinuated by the oligarchs. This party was working incessantly in clubs and secret societies about whose methods of organisation we are woefully ignorant. In 411—that is, two years after the failure of the Sicilian expedition—these intriguers had their way, and Athens consented to try the experiment of oligarchy “until the end of the war.” Government henceforth was to be in the hands of a council of 400, for government by council is the prevailing feature of oligarchy. But, like most Greek oligarchies, Athens was also to have a sort of select Assembly, consisting of 5000 of the well-to-do citizens. The number of 5000 seems to represent the hoplite body of the Athenian army. Thus Athens was imitating Sparta in limiting citizen rights to her fully equipped land warriors, and excluding the “naval mob” who were her real strength in war. As usual in oligarchies, even this purged Assembly seems to have been for show rather than for use. The government was, in fact, what it is generally called, a Government of the Four Hundred. Fortunately for human liberty the experiment was not a success. It only lasted for three months. The Four Hundred had, it is true, come rather late upon the stage if they were to bring the war to a successful conclusion. But they failed to do anything useful, and their accession to power was marked by a failure at sea and the loss of Eubœa. Assassination, a pleasantly rare weapon in Greek politics, removed the leader of the oligarchs, and Athens reverted to democracy.

Once more, however, at the very end of the war, when the city surrendered, Athens had perforce, at the bidding of

Plate LXII.GIRL’S HEADEruckmann

Plate LXII.GIRL’S HEAD

Eruckmann

Lysander, her conqueror, to revise her constitution in an oligarchic direction. Once more the sacred laws were thrown into the melting-pot, and there were elaborate programmes, and discussions as to the precise form of oligarchy which should be adopted. But while the preliminaries were going on the administration fell into the hands of a board of so-called commissioners charged, like Oliver Cromwell, with the revision of the constitution. Like Oliver these men soon found themselves in a position of power too good to be lost. They were called the Thirty Tyrants, and they deserved the name. They ruled with a strong hand, banished their enemies, disarmed the citizen army, and began a system of private plunder, with the spears of the Spartan garrison to enforce their commands. Athens never forgot and never forgave this nightmare of the Thirty. Most of them were men of talent, some of them were philosophers and literary men who had sat at the feet of Socrates. Critias, the Robespierre of the party, quarrelled with Theramenes, its philosophical Danton, an advocate of the “moderate Constitution,” and sent him to execution. Before very long, one is glad to know, honest men (by which term one means, in this instance, democrats) were gathering on the borders of Attica, and under the leadership of Thrasybulus won their way home and crushed the “gentle Critias” and his gang for ever.

The year 402 is the year of restored democracy. It is called the archonship of Eucleides, who is not our Euclid, but another man of the same name. We hear no more of oligarchy at Athens. Henceforth she is a democracy, as before and more so. Where Athenians had formerly got cheap corn they now got it for nothing. Where they had formerly received a fee of threepence for public duties they now got fourpence-halfpenny. According to Aristotle more than 20,000 persons were in receipt of State payment. However much business the company might transact, the shareholders were determined upon one thing—to pay dividends to one another, with a bonus in exceptional years. It is hard to say where the dividendscame from. No doubt there was a good deal of commerce and banking business at the Peiræus, mostly in the hands of half-naturalised foreigners. The rich were bled unmercifully, so that they tended to emigrate or grow poor. And yet in the fourth century Athens was steadily rising in the political scale. A glad day came when her admiral Conon, with Persian help, was able to rebuild her Long Walls. She started a new maritime league, under better safeguards, this time, for the allies. She even recovered something of an empire. She could not afford statues in ivory and gold, but she built her theatre with stone, laid out a stadium, and produced many charming works of art. In short, though her ambitions were curtailed, life was very free and full, and, I believe, very pleasant, in fourth-century Athens. Her statesmen had to be content with smaller schemes; they were a good deal concerned with finance: indeed, it was hard work to make both ends meet. Generals complained that they got no pay; and now that hired troops were in vogue warfare was an expensive pastime. The Athenians were rather more hysterical than before, even more apt to make Byngs of their unsuccessful admirals. They talked more than ever, and did rather less. But on the whole they were well governed, and they played a not unimportant part in the warfare and diplomacy of Greece. The restored democracy was a success.

While Athens is recuperating her strength we may turn aside for a moment to watch two other States make their successive attempts to hold the overlordship of Hellas; remembering all the time that the northern horizon is already dark with the storm that is going to sweep the whole of ancient Greece into political insignificance.

The first episode of Greek international history in the fourth century is a Spartan domination, lasting less than thirty years, but generally considered as one of the imperial experiments of Greece. In addition to her own permanent hegemony over the

FIG. 1. THE MARBLE FAUN, AFTER PRAXITELESFIG. 2. THE EROS OF CENTOCELLEPlate LXIII

FIG. 1. THE MARBLE FAUN, AFTER PRAXITELES

FIG. 2. THE EROS OF CENTOCELLE

Plate LXIII

greater part of Southern and Central Greece, Sparta had now stepped into the uncomfortable shoes of Athens, and found herself the mistress of more than a hundred island or seaport “cities.” Now Sparta, as she was frequently reminded, had gone into the Peloponnesian War as champion of the liberty of Hellas against a tyrant city. She had gained the day partly through the virtue of that charming phrase, but I doubt whether anybody seriously expected her to set the Ionian cities and islands at liberty. They were not used to liberty, and would not have known what to do with it. They had utterly lost the habit of fighting or doing anything but pay for their own safety. They were too lazy and broad-minded to care very much where their tribute went. None of them had been enthusiastic about its previous destination. We hear of no bitter lamentations when they discovered that Sparta was selling them wholesale back to the Persians. Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes, the western satraps of the Great King, seem to have been easygoing gentlemen of normal Eastern calm and duplicity. They were not of the stamp of conquerors or despots, but they had heaps of money and were adepts at making and breaking treaties. Sparta both by geography and by habit was an inland power. She never produced more than one competent admiral, and that was the man now at the zenith of his power, Lysander. As Sparta had now inherited a maritime empire, and as she was unable and unwilling to embark definitely upon a naval career, it became necessary to organise a system of garrisons and governors in every city under her sway. This work of organisation fell to Lysander—the nearest equivalent to a Cæsar that Greece ever produced. The Spartan empire, such as it was, was Lysander’s handiwork. Of course every state that came into Spartan hands was forcibly converted to oligarchy. This has often been represented as another example of Sparta’s tyranny. But a survey of Greece will soon convince us that oligarchy, and not democracy, is the normal condition of the Greekpolis; and, in fact, with a few rare exceptions, it is only Athens and the states directly under herinfluence which are democracies. But Lysander was corrupt, and he entrusted the government in each town to a group of local aristocrats who had won or purchased his interest. Thus the states of the Spartan empire were generally governed by a Council of Ten, working hand in glove with a Spartan captain and a Spartan garrison. Athens, as we have seen, was also accustomed to send garrisons where she conquered. But all that we know of the Spartan temper assures us that the little finger of Sparta was thicker than the loins of Athens.

Like Pausanias before him, Admiral Lysander became intoxicated with success. A very little liberty and luxury was enough to bring giddiness to the ascetic heads of Sparta. Lysander began to think revolutionary thoughts of a Sparta where men could be rich and free like the rest of the world. And the infection spread. Sparta was now earning a thousand talents a year from her empire, and though money was still forbidden at home, and though Sparta had as yet absolutely no coinage of her own, private Spartans were unquestionably getting rich quickly. A rich Spartan was a horrid anomaly: there was nothing that money could buy in Laconia except land. Hence family estates began to change hands faster, and the class of landless, therefore voteless, men of Spartan blood rapidly multiplied. It was Sparta’s boast that she alone in all Greece had never suffered a revolution. She never came so near it as on the present occasion, when Lysander with his riches was trying to subvert the Lycurgean constitution by bribing the Delphic oracle, and the discontented Inferiors at home were planning a secret rebellion. Both failed: the conspiracy of Cinadon was detected by the vigilant Ephors and ruthlessly crushed, while Lysander in playing the part of king-maker unwittingly made a king who was his equal in ability. Very soon the conqueror of Athens found himself unnecessary to Sparta, and had to submit to the indignity of being tried and pardoned.

The new king was Agesilaus, whose long and important career was the subject of many biographies. He it was whopointed the path of glory to Alexander by revealing the utter incapacity of the Persians to guard their treasures. For Sparta had quickly fallen out with the satraps, and Agesilaus marched about the Phrygian and Lydian coasts gathering plunder with very little difficulty. One of the biographers of Agesilaus was his friend and admirer Xenophon, who was concerned in a great adventure which likewise served to betray the weakness of the Persian empire.

The British schoolboy, fleshing his young teeth upon the “Anabasis” of Xenophon, struggling in a wilderness of parasangs and paradigms and puzzling out what Cheirisophos said and where they pitched camp that night, seldom realises the romantic nature of the enterprise. There was a dynastic struggle in Persia. Cyrus, a bold and able prince, was disputing the succession to the throne with the rightful successor, Artaxerxes. Knowing the weakness of his native troops, Cyrus conceived the idea of stiffening them with ten thousand hired Greeks, for by now the use of mercenaries was growing more frequent in the Greek world. These troops were mostly Spartans, their leader was Clearchus, a Spartan, and Xenophon of Athens was a volunteer under his command. They were recruited without knowing the full nature of the enterprise, and it was only when they found themselves in the heart of Asia that they learnt to their horror that the objective was the far-distant capital. At length they reached Cunaxa, near Babylon, where a mighty host opposed their advance. In the battle Cyrus was killed and the native portion of his troops fled or surrendered or were slain. But the Greeks had fought so valiantly that the victorious army of Artaxerxes did not care to attempt their capture, though the crafty Tissaphernes succeeded in assassinating their leaders and leading the army astray into the wilderness. Thus the Ten Thousand found themselves stranded in a hostile country, without generals and without guides, nearly two thousand miles from home. But being Greeks, with a proper contempt for the barbarian, they scorned to lose heart, though the chance of a safe return must haveseemed hopeless. The strong political instinct of the city-state was their salvation. They resolved themselves into a wanderingpolis, held assemblies, made speeches, elected generals, with Xenophon among them, and preserved perfect self-control and discipline. So began the Catabasis, an immense and dangerous march north-westward, through the passes of the Taurus and the uplands of Armenia, fighting the wild Kurds of the hills, struggling with cold and hunger, utterly ignorant of geography except for the belief that if they went on long enough in the same direction they would some day reach the sea. Their glad cry of “Thalassa! Thalassa!” when at last they saw the shining waters of the Euxine is a cry that has echoed through the ages. Henceforth they were passing through the series of Greek colonies that fringed the south coast of the Black Sea. Though many more adventures awaited them and they were seldom very welcome visitors, yet no fewer than 6000 reached home, and, we trust, lived happily ever afterwards. Not so much the fighting as the courage of the march and the sense of discipline make this one of the finest exploits in Greek history.

As for Xenophon, he retired to spend his leisure and his money close to his beloved Sparta. Purchasing an estate near Olympia, he devoted his veteran days to literature and sport. His life in Triphylia is a picture of the retired sporting colonel of religious and aristocratic tendencies. He regards his estate as a stewardship for the goddess Artemis. He builds her a shrine, an altar with a statue of cypress-wood modelled on the temple and golden statue of Ephesus. Hard by was a river full of fish, and an orchard, with pasture-lands and upland game preserves, abounding in wild boars, gazelles, and deer. Every year he gave a sacrifice to the goddess, and invited his neighbours to the feast. There would be barley porridge, wheaten loaves, and sweetmeats. Game had previously been supplied by a day’s hunting on a large scale, in which Xenophon’s sons conducted the operations and all the neighbours took part if they liked.

Xenophon is one of the most accomplished and versatile of

FIG. 1. HEAD OF A YOUTH

FIG. 2. WINGED HEAD OF HYPNOSPlate LXIV

FIG. 2. WINGED HEAD OF HYPNOS

Plate LXIV

minor writers. He wrote, besides his “Anabasis,” a treatise on hunting, with valuable information on the breeding of horses and hounds; he wrote memoirs of his beloved but little comprehended master in philosophy, Socrates, who had been put to death at Athens while Xenophon was on his expedition; he wrote also perhaps the earliest European work of prose fiction, in which he sketched the proper training of a prince and a gentleman, under the title of “The Education of Cyrus”; he wrote a history of Greece beginning where Thucydides left off and ending with the downfall of Sparta; among his minor works are treatises on finance, on the duties of a captain of horse, and a glowing panegyric on the Spartan constitution. An equally warm indictment of the Athenian democracy is falsely ascribed to his pen. He was an aristocrat and philo-Laconian by sympathy, and the democracy of Athens had earned his displeasure by slaying Socrates and by banishing himself. That was only natural, seeing that he had taken Spartan service in the field against her, and she seems very generously to have allowed him to return home before the end of his life. In his versatile intelligence, his cosmopolitan habits as a soldier of fortune, in his youthful enthusiasm for philosophy, and in the journalistic spirit which prompted him to write pamphlets on any topic which interested him, no less than in his dislike of democracy, Xenophon is perhaps the most characteristic figure of the fourth century, though he is too military and too conservative to be a typical Athenian of any age.

Greece did not, of course, enjoy peace during the thirty years of Spartan predominance. It could never be said at any point of Greek history that the land had rest forty years. There was fighting in Asia Minor against the Persians, and fighting in Greece round the Isthmus, a tiresome and lengthy struggle with discontented allies, generally called the Corinthian War. We cannot get a clear conception of the life of a Greek state unless we realise that peace was an abnormal condition.

During the period of which we are speaking there had been some important developments in the art of war. As the soldieris the most conservative of men with the exception of the priest, so next to religion warfare is the most conservative of human activities. Field tactics had altered little since the Persian wars. A Greek battle still depended on the shock of two lines of hoplites, largely a question of weight in impact. If you could once cut your opponent’s line the victory was yours, because then you found his right or shieldless side open to your spear. A Greek soldier with his heavy shield on his left arm could only defend his front and left. For this purpose the men stood shoulder to shoulder in a line made as deep as possible, for the sake of weight in the scrimmage, and, I fear, to prevent the Greek disorder of running away.

It was the secret of Spartan pre-eminence in war that a Spartan hoplite never thought of running away. But now in this fourth century we enter upon a scientific age when men are beginning to apply their reason logically to all the activities of life instead of trusting to habit. Soldiering, as in the case of the Ten Thousand, is passing over from amateur patriots to mercenary professionals. It is clear that if new ideas are to revolutionise the art of war, the supremacy of Sparta is doomed. Strong arms and thick skulls flourished in the vale of Eurotas. Sparta had a rude shock when an Athenian condottiere named Iphicrates cut up a Spartan company of hoplites with a newfangled battalion of his own training, a body of drilled light infantry. And now in the fullness of time Bœotia was to produce its man of genius—Epaminondas the Theban.

In 378 Sparta had sold the Ionian cities back to the Great King, who sent down from Susa a beautiful treaty saying, “King Artaxerxes thinks it just that Asia Minor and the Ionian islands shall belong to him, and that the rest of the cities of Greece, both great and small, shall be independent.” That was really the end of Sparta’s dream of an oversea empire. She had found it too fatiguing for a land power. Armed with this treaty, she began to run amuck among her neighbours. She assailed the Arcadian city of Mantinea and tore it up into villages. One of her captains marching past Athens made a

Plate LXV.THE HERMES OF PRAXITELESEnglish Photo Co., Athens

Plate LXV.THE HERMES OF PRAXITELES

English Photo Co., Athens

dash for Peiræus, but was fortunately foiled. Another had played the same trick on Thebes, this time successfully, for he seized and garrisoned the citadel. His outrageous performance was approved at home, but it seems at last to have roused the sluggish spirit of the dwellers in the Bœotian marshes. There was a delightfully romantic conspiracy organised from Athens, and a body of Theban patriots liberated their city. Among the patriots was Pelopidas, a brave and skilful soldier, and his friend was Epaminondas, one of the greatest men in all history.

Two qualities, in addition to the ordinary human virtues of courage and wisdom, seem to distinguish Epaminondas: he showed originality even in the art of war, and he had the broad mental vision which we demand from statesmen but seldom find in Greeks. I do not see any proof that he possessed the full spirit of Panhellenism; he was emphatically a Theban first, whatever he might be afterwards. But he had, it seems, an eye for an international situation. It is the measure at once of his success and of his failure that the rise and fall of Thebes is exactly conterminous with the rise and death of Epaminondas.

Thebes and Athens had both suffered from the wanton aggression of Sparta. They now made common cause to avenge it, and at the battle of Leuctra (371) Sparta suffered defeat in a pitched land battle on a great scale for the first time in her history. The victory of Thebes was wholly due to the new tactics of Epaminondas. He had formed a Thebancorps d’élite, composed, in a fashion strikingly characteristic of the Greek mind, of 150 pairs of lovers sworn to conquer or die together. Thus he pressed into his service the only romantic feeling which the Greeks understood, the relation between David and Jonathan or between Achilles and Patroclus. This Sacred Band formed the front of the left wing. Further, whereas the whole Spartan line was drawn up as usual with a uniform depth of twelve spears, Epaminondas made his left fifty deep and flung it forward in the attack. The extra weight of this deep wing broke the Spartan right. King Cleombrotus anda thousand Spartans were slain. The loss of men was serious for a little state like Sparta, but the loss in prestige was even worse. This, in Xenophon’s story, is how the news came to Sparta: “It chanced to be the last day of the Boys’ Gymnastic Festival, and the choir of men were therefore at home. When the Ephors heard of the disaster they were sorely grieved, as in my opinion was bound to be the case, but they did not send the men’s choir out or stop the games. They communicated the names of the fallen to their relatives, but they warned the women to bear their loss in silence and not to make lamentation. So next day you could see the families of the slain going about in public with cheerful, smiling faces, but as for those whose menfolk had been announced as living, they went about in gloom and shame.” So Lacedæmon set itself with dogged resolution to endure what the gods might send.

Epaminondas with true insight determined to raise up a counterbalancing power in the Peloponnesus to hang upon the flank of Sparta if she should ever again try to tyrannise over Greece. His plan was to form city-states among the Arcadians and Messenians, those backward children of Nature who had always preferred a village life among their hills. Mantinea was restored to the rank of a state, Messenia was given a new capital, and a new and splendid city was specially constructed to unite several scattered Arcadian villages in one interesting federal constitution. But the Great City, as she was proudly named, was not a great success. Perhaps the Arcadians were too arcadian in their habits to fulfil the scheme of Epaminondas. It is very characteristic of the Greek mind that the news of Theban triumph was very ill received in the city of her ally Athens. Athens might cherish a respectable hereditary feud with Sparta, but Thebes she had always detested. Thebes was her next-door neighbour. Though you might have to fight a Spartan, you couldn’t help liking him. Once again the orators drew upon that inexhaustible precedent of the Persian wars, when Sparta and Athens had stood together against Thebes and Persia. So Athens was persuaded to draw away from

Plate LXVI.THE HERMES OF PRAXITELES: HEADEnglish Photo Co., Athens

Plate LXVI.THE HERMES OF PRAXITELES: HEAD

English Photo Co., Athens

Thebes and form an alliance upon equal terms with Sparta. But her action was not very vigorous.

The nine years between the battles of Leuctra and Mantinea are commonly described by historians as a period of Theban hegemony. It is true that Thebes was probably on land the most powerful state in Greece, and that Epaminondas played the foremost part in the diplomacy of that period, but she had no great following of states, and as Athens, Sparta, and Corinth were among those who declined to follow she can hardly be said to have led Greece. Also it is interesting to notice that the liberal-minded Epaminondas found it just as impossible as Athens and Sparta had done to hold a Greek alliance together without the use of garrisons. He sent harmosts into Achaia and Sicyon. Thebes also was as ready as Sparta to interfere with constitutions. We can understand Sparta, with her aristocratic habits, showing a prejudice for oligarchy, or Athens, the city of liberty and free speech, encouraging democracy, but that Thebes, herself oligarchically constituted, should now enforce democracy upon her allies can only be a piece of cold-blooded diplomacy due to the knowledge that oligarchies were generally committed to the Spartan side. Nor can Thebes be acquitted of trafficking with the enemy. For Pelopidas was sent to Susa to plead the ancient alliance of Thebes and Persia at the battle of Platæa! In these three respects all the hegemonies of Greece are alike, all tarred with the same brush.

Thebes tried to kill the snake she had scotched at Leuctra. Several times she started to smoke out the Spartan nest. Twice she penetrated the inviolable precincts of Sparta, but each time when she looked into the streets of the unwalled city and saw the Spartan warriors standing at arms before their temples and hearths, she only looked—and found more pressing business elsewhere. Let one chronicler at least decline to quit that sinking ship. The foolish Arcadians might brag of their ancient descent as children of the soil; but the Spartans, under their old lion Agesilaus, could still scatter Arcadianswith the wind of their spears in a “Tearless Battle,” wherein not a single Spartan perished.

So we come to the last great fight of this epoch—that of Mantinea. Here Spartans and Athenians fought on the same side against Thebes. The Theban tactics were the same precisely as at Leuctra, and the Spartans had learnt nothing by the experience. They saw the line advancingen échelon, they saw the deepened left wing, and they took no steps to counteract it. As before, they were broken and routed. But in the hour of defeat a chance spear found its billet in the body of Epaminondas, and, like Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham, that hero fell in the hour of victory. When he heard that the two men he had hoped for as his successors had also fallen he cried to his followers to make peace with Sparta, and so expired. The star of Thebes waned with his death; and, indeed, all the fires of the Greek firmament soon paled before the rising sun of Macedonia—and Philip had learnt warfare from Epaminondas.

In the fourth century—or rather in that earlier half of it which forms the theme of the present chapter—Greek art pursues its inevitable course of development. Perhaps the wasting influence of the Peloponnesian War, that most wasteful and unsatisfactory contest, had brought a touch of disillusionment upon the high ideals and youthful hopes with which the Grand Century had set forth. Perhaps there may be something in the racial theory, which holds that the vigorous Northern strain was beginning to succumb to the influence of a Southern climate, while the artistic temperament native to the South was reasserting itself and disturbing the equilibrium between clever and brave. But it may have been simply the working of some law of Nature that all arts pass from the phase of earnest endeavour to that sense of triumphant mastery which so fatally entices into luxuriance. In sculpture I think we shall see that it was thus with Greece. There is unquestionably in

Plate LXVII.APOLLO AND MARSYASEnglish Photo Co., Athens

Plate LXVII.APOLLO AND MARSYAS

English Photo Co., Athens

the fourth century some slackening of purpose, some loss of ideals, some tendency in the direction of prettiness and languor.

But we must not yet begin to speak of degeneration. The Hermes of Praxiteles and the “Republic” of Plato are not works of decadence. Some modern historians are rather vulture-like in their scent for decay. They show an unseemly gusto in tracing the causes of decline and fall of states, so that they begin the post-mortem long before the breath is out of their patient. Greece of the fourth century is still very active and vigorous, still improving the old arts and inventing new ones. Fourth-century Athens is far too like twentieth-century England for an Englishman to feel quite comfortable in using the term “degeneration” of her.

In politics, for example, she was beginning to make things much less comfortable for the rich. With taxes upon unearned increment she was beginning to drive capital out of the country, so that millionaires could no longer be found to undertake single-handed the “liturgy” of equipping a battleship, but had to be grouped in companies for the purpose. Statesmen, too, were throwing off the dignified reticence of the old regime, to parade the most sordid financial considerations, and to set class against class, by reminding the poor how much nicer it would be if they were rich. Even more was done for the poor now than formerly; they were taught to look to the State for cheap food, and even free education. The principle of payment of members was introduced. Conservatives were alarmed by the growing numbers of state functionaries openly drawing salaries from the Treasury for the duties which they performed, instead of leaving those duties to be neglected, or expecting the rich to perform them in their spare time and recoup themselves in less odiously public fashions. In international relations there was some abatement of nationalist frenzy; in colonial systems there was a marked advance in the direction of federalism, accompanied by a devolutionary process towards local government. In the theatre there was a movement towards lighter entertainments and highly elaborate musical comedies, withlavish display in the matter of dress and scenery. Favourite chorus-girls made large incomes, and sometimes married very respectably indeed. In sport, too, there was a growing tendency to professionalism, much deplored by old-fashioned people. Boxers and wrestlers no longer considered the grace of their movements, because they found that victory was apt to follow more consistently upon hard training and an animal diet. In literature, as we shall presently see more fully, poetry was beginning to yield to prose, and prose was becoming more businesslike and scientific. In social life thinkers were beginning to raise the problem of sex, and even women themselves may have joined in the agitation for some measure of justice for their sex. Euripides, indeed, who is rather apt to go further than modern delicacy permits in his treatment of social problems, had actually made his Medea utter these audacious words: “I would rather stand thrice in the line of battle than bear a child once.”

If we had to sum up the new characteristic of the fourth century under a single phrase, we should perhaps be justified in saying that the professional spirit was making itself felt in all directions. We see it in the military art, where the citizen hoplites, with their extremely simple tactics and strategy, are yielding to trained bands under professional captains. The statesmen are now no longer the famous generals of the day, nor men marked out by birth and wealth for high position, but trained speakers, and often professional pleaders. Literature is no longer in the hands of men like Æschylus and Sophocles, who were soldiers or generals as well, though Xenophon is of course a notable example of the writer who takes literature among his other activities. But now there are professional sophists teaching oratory and various literary arts. Books circulate freely, schools of professional philosophers arise, as in Plato’s garden of the Academy. This specialisation naturally involves an increased attention to technical processes, a more scientific and less human outlook, and a growth of self-consciousness. For example, it is now that constitutional histories begin to be written. While people are young and

Plate LXVIII.MELEAGER: HEAD AFTER SCOPASAnderson

Plate LXVIII.MELEAGER: HEAD AFTER SCOPAS

Anderson

strong they are apt to take their constitutions for granted. Greece is now grown to full stature, and beginning to grow introspective and emotional.

The public taste has changed somewhat in matters of art. The impoverished States of the fourth century no longer lavish their wealth upon glorious temples, and sumptuous statues in ivory and gold. Private dedications occupy more of the artist’s time, and though the subjects are still of a religious and ideal character, yet the gods have become a great deal more human. Herein we may probably see the influence of Euripides. The heroes of the epic cycle no longer possessed much interest for their own sake. Jason and Medea only raised for Euripides an absorbing problem in matrimonial relations. So the Apollos and Aphrodites of the fourth century are as human as the Madonnas and St. Sebastians of the sixteenth. Psychology intrudes upon art. Allegorical impersonations begin to be popular among the subjects of statuary. Human portraiture also begins, though slowly, to be practised with some realism. Nudity in sculpture, which had hitherto been mainly confined to athletic works, where it is obviously appropriate and necessary, is now extended even to images of deities, and under the chisel of Praxiteles Aphrodite uncovers her loveliness and modesty. Eros, too, her son and tormentor, becomes a popular type, not yet as the chubby babe of Græco-Roman times, but as an “ephebus,” almost full-grown, with long wings upon his shoulders. Hermes, as we have already remarked, begins to replace the more vigorous Apollo as the youthful type of celestial beauty. Nevertheless this growing worship of human grace has not yet suffered any visible taint of sensuality. Whether or not it leads that way is a question for the future to decide, but Greek art has not yet lost its reticence and dignity.

Meanwhile the artist has improved enormously in the technical details of craftsmanship. It was now only a foreign potentate who could give commissions for statues in suchsplendid materials as were at the disposal of Pheidias. Bronze was still the ordinary material for important works, but marble, which had formerly been chiefly used for ornament in architecture, was now commonly employed for statues even by the great masters. With more serviceable tools for drilling, sawing, and pointing (where that rather mechanical process was employed), the great artists of the fourth century could play upon marble as if it were wax or clay. They could represent textures and surfaces by the degree of their finish, so that the leather of the shoe is of a surface distinct from the skin of the foot in the Hermes of Praxiteles. There is an extremely subtle contrast between the leopard-skin and the flesh of the young Satyr by the same artist in the admirable torso copy which is in the Louvre. Whereas earlier artists had tried to represent hair by grooves gouged out upon the surface of the head or by rendering each tress as a separate thread, Praxiteles discovered the marvellous impression of curls that could be produced by roughly blocking out several masses and leaving the play of light and deep shadow to indicate a surface movable and alive. New secrets of sculptural anatomy were now at command. Praxiteles discovered the value of that groove which runs vertically down the front of the body between the pectoral and abdominal muscles on each side. He discovered also the anatomical distinction between the male and female brow in that ridge of flesh, known to artists as the bar of Michelangelo, which overhangs the eyebrows. By setting the eyeballs deeper under the brow, and emphasising the long drooping curve of the upper eyelid, the fourth-century artists greatly enhanced their command of expression and emotion, transient qualities after which the fifth century had not greatly cared to strive. Scopas, indeed, carried this discovery to the verge of the legitimate, for the few incomplete fragments of his work which survive are almost theatrical in the intensity of their gaze. Marble, of course, demands methods of its own distinct from those of metal. It is due to the material, in a large measure, that various

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