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THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Phases of Its Progression in Religion, 
 Polity, Philosophy and Art 
 
 BY 
 
 KATE STEPHENS 
 
 Author of "American Thumb-Prints: Mettle of our 
 
 Men and Women," "A Woman's 
 
 Heart," etc., etc. 
 
 mew Korft 
 
 STURGIS & WALTON 
 
 COMPANY 
 
 1914 
 
Copyright 1914 
 By STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1914 
 
FOREWOED 
 
 A BBiEF account of Hellenic thought, Hel- 
 lenic feeling and Hellenic will before their 
 subversion by the rude genius of Macedonia, 
 is within these covers. The book essays to 
 make the old Greek spirit speak to the gen- 
 eral reader who has never studied Greek, and, 
 if he will, to the Greek student — ^it is an en- 
 deavor to tell somewhat of the message of 
 Greek thought and action, of the lifting and 
 broadening of the vision of human life as- 
 sociated with the social mind and will of the 
 old-day Hellenes. Just as Greek ideas, for- 
 gotten except by the eremite student, brought 
 a new world of light to the wondering peoples 
 of the west, more than four hundred and fifty 
 years ago, so now, a reconsideration of Greek 
 ideals might well seize the often poorly held 
 or wholly unoccupied imagination of to-day 
 and give to our life profounder and wider 
 meaning. 
 
 My object, I said, has been to bring out the 
 spiritual perspective of that ever wonderful 
 
ii FOREWORD 
 
 Greek life, to give various aspects of the life 's 
 evolution, to present its tendencies as a 
 simple tMng (as they must be in the great 
 whole of human history), to point to early 
 forms of many present-day ideas and usages 
 which express the inward consciousness of 
 man, to endeavor to turn away certain false 
 conceptions of the Greeks and by holding at- 
 tention to their accomplishment to show that 
 they were a people whose heads were clear 
 and hearts exceedingly human. 
 
 The subject is old, much spoken about. 
 Still ever new in its surpassing significance 
 to all time. I hope my essay may reflect 
 somewhat of the old Greek directness and 
 Greek penetration of life. But any setting 
 forth of the unfolding of the Hellenes ' spirit 
 is apt to suggest some such cry as "Inade- 
 quate," and the inevitable comparison of 
 "Man's nothing-perfect to God's All-Com- 
 plete." 
 
 In mentally reviemng those to whom I am 
 in this writing debtor, I am weighted with a 
 sense of obligation to so many who have 
 thought and taught that I am not able to call 
 by name one half. The list would begin with 
 the Greeks themselves and their high utter- 
 
FOREWOKD iii 
 
 ance. It would pass to many a worker of the 
 far-away Eenaissance, who with the zeal of a 
 lover of his kind searched a wonderful, for- 
 gotten world 
 
 "with the throttling hands of Death at strife, 
 
 Ground he at grammar; 
 StUl, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife. 
 
 While he could stammer 
 He settled Hoti's business — let it be — 
 
 Properly based Oun — 
 Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, 
 
 Dead from the waist down." 
 
 A glorious roll of scholars would carry the 
 list on through centuries, and end only in the 
 great delvers in Greek thought and Greek 
 earth in this day of ours, and the learned 
 conclusions of those men and women. Such 
 consciousness of indebtedness forbids my in- 
 cluding in these covers what is in such a work 
 often deemed an essential, a bibliographical 
 list. 
 
 Psychologists tell about a law they have 
 formulated — that in operations of the mind 
 unconscious phenomena play a preponderat- 
 ing part. For years it has been my habit to 
 reread matter of special appeal. Some ex- 
 pression I have gained memoriter may hav^ 
 
iv FOREWORD 
 
 crept into tMs essay. If this should prove a 
 fact, I should regret it. To all that I know 
 as quoted "words I have put rigorous quota- 
 tion marks, to statements indefinitely remem- 
 bered such phrases as "it is said," and I most 
 sincerely hope I have in no instance omitted 
 that justice — ^poor return, it would be, for the 
 delight of reading thoughtful books. 
 
 New York, 1914. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 FAQE 
 
 GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT TO OUR EVOLUTION 3 
 
 ^GEAN PEOPLES FORERUNNING THE 
 
 GREEKS 23 
 
 THEIR AET GIFT; 
 
 THEIK RELIGION OP MOTHER EARTH; 
 
 THEIR GOVERNMENT; 
 
 INROADS OF PEOPLES PROM THE NORTH. 
 
 HEROIC AGE OF THE GREEKS .... 47 
 
 ITS RELIGION OP THE PHENOMENA OF NA- 
 TURE AND THE SOCIAL GROUP; 
 ITS KINGSHIP OF HEROES; 
 ITS MORAL IDEAS, REVERENT PEAR, ETC.; 
 THE EPIC ITS ART. 
 
 BURGEONING DEMOCRACY; ITS PURITAN- 
 ISM; ITS ART 83 
 
 PASSING OP THE MONARCHY, OLIGARCHY, 
 TYRANNUS; THE CONSTRUCTIVE INDI- 
 VIDUALISM OF CITIES; 
 
 ORPHISM, ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES, RECRU- 
 DESCENCE OF SUPERSTITION; 
 
 EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY: PHYSICS FORE- 
 CASTING MODERN SCIENCE ; - 
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF LYRIC POETRY: NATIONAL 
 GAMES OP THE HELLENES. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FIFTY YEARS OF DISTINGUISHED WORKS 203 
 
 A DEFENSIVE, UNIFYING WAR: DEMOCEACT 
 
 IN ATHENS ; 
 EACE SPIRIT IN ARCHITECTURE ADORNING 
 
 ATHENS, IN SCULPTURE AND ALLIED 
 
 ARTS; 
 THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR; ITS RESULTS; 
 IMPERISHABLE HISTORIES OP HERODOTUS 
 
 AND THUCYDIDES: WHY THEY WERE 
 
 WRITTEN ; 
 RISE OF THE DRAMA; SUCH MASTERS AS 
 
 ^SCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES, 
 
 ARISTOPHANES ; 
 COMING OF THE SOPHISTS AND THE NEW 
 
 EDUCATION ; 
 SOCRATES, PLATO; PINNACLE OF THE GREEK 
 
 ASCENT ; 
 
 DECADENCE OF THE GREEK SPIRIT . . 301 
 
 WHAT WERE THE CAUSES OF THE DETERIORA- 
 TION 1 EXHAUSTION OF THE GREEKS ? 
 
 MALARIA ? ECONOMIC CONDITIONS ? 
 
 LOSS OF RACE CONSCIOUSNESS AND 
 
 SUBVERSION OF IDEALS? 
 
 DYNAMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GREEKS; 
 CERTAIN LIKENESSES OF GREEK AND 
 AMERICAN ; 
 
 THE COSMIC VISION THE GREEKS WORKED 
 OUT. 
 
GIFTS OF THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 TO OUR EVOLUTION 
 
History is the development of Spirit in Time. — Hegel, 
 in The Philosophy of History. 
 
 Mankind is not a mere collection of detached indi- 
 viduals, or man could possess no knowledge of any 
 unity of scientific truth. . . . Human experience is not 
 merely a collection of detached observations, but forms 
 an actual spiritual miity, whose type is not that of a 
 mechanism, whose connections are ideally significant, 
 whose constitution is essentially that which the ideal of 
 unified truth requires. — Josiah Rotce, in Loyalty and 
 Insight. 
 
 That society is not a mere aggregate but an organic 
 growth, that it forms a whole the laws of whose growth 
 can be studied apart from those of the individual alone, 
 supplies the most characteristic postulate of modern 
 speculation. 
 
 Vast social organization is the work of a vast series 
 of generations unconsciously fashioning the order which 
 they transmit to their descendants. — Sir Leslie 
 Stephen, in The Sdence of Ethics. 
 
GIFTS OF THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 TO OUR EVOLUTION 
 
 Uniformity and necessity of natural law is 
 the first great masim of our twentieth, century 
 science. It leads investigators to search for 
 origins, the cause behind the fact. Through 
 its light phenomena themselves bear witness 
 how they are and why they are. It is the 
 principle upon which the sciences have reared 
 their structure. In the sixth century before 
 Christ this law established itself among the 
 lonians of Asia Minor. 
 
 The second great formula of science, an- 
 nounced by early Greek physicists, by 
 thinkers through many ages, and finally after 
 long suppression becoming a radical dictator 
 of the sciences of our nineteenth century, is 
 that nature is not only subject to the law of 
 uniformity but that ever alongside of uni- 
 formity is infinite and consistent gradation, 
 that the world,, is a result of a process of 
 growth, that more complex life grows out»of 
 simpler forins.^ This second maxim, over- 
 
 3 
 
4 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 whelming many a misbelief, advances the 
 study of nature toward the standard and re- 
 quirement of reason whose first postulate is 
 the unity of all being. 
 
 These two maxims have gained undeniable 
 results in illuminating the world of physical 
 nature. But in that other world of psychical 
 nature, of which we know no settled form and 
 which we call the world of spirit, these prin- 
 ciples have no less force and application. In 
 that also is the uniformity and necessity of 
 law. This, Heraclitus, a philosopher of the 
 early lonians, bespoke in part, "The sun will 
 not go beyond his bounds: if he does the 
 avenging deities, handmaids of justice, will 
 find him out." And later Anaxagoras told 
 of it, and Sophocles, with unfailing pene- 
 tration and art, set forth the law in his 
 dramas. 
 
 Spirit is mysterious in its workings. We 
 are ignorant of its laws. Yet in its world is 
 traceable an unbroken development of con- 
 sciousness from the first faint dawning in 
 brute sense upon our planet and millions of 
 years ago, traceable with many an off -wander- 
 ing and aside but still ever clear, and rising 
 through works and their aspirations — through 
 
GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 5 
 
 instinct, habit, sentiment, languages, religions 
 and other institutions of human amalgama- 
 tion, art, literature, science, — to where the 
 glorified spirit of man comprehends itself 
 one with absolute reason and absolute love. 
 Throughout this upward trend, this urging, 
 an invisible, spiritual energy has borne on — 
 by evidence with a cosmic meaning and cos- 
 mic end. 
 
 In this conception we are not far from a 
 faith of the old Hellenes in a divine and uni- 
 versal order in human affairs, what we to-day 
 call a principle of progress, enduring through 
 many phases of the Greek spirit, and evi- 
 dencing itself in their state, their literature 
 and their art. 
 
 Strata of our earth make clear records of 
 foregoing and material forms of life. In the 
 records of the spirit are also shining ages 
 and epochs, more full and more intelligible 
 than the history mere matter has written — 
 records preserved in the inspiration the hu- 
 man race has voiced in its poetry and prose, 
 in the metals and marbles the race has 
 brought from the earth's recesses and 
 wrought in arts, in the laws and politics its 
 peoples have founded and conducted for the 
 
6 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 common weal — all golden fossils of uplifting 
 and outspreading life. 
 
 Spirit, the expansive force of the world, 
 grows towards ideas. Ideas are the eternal 
 forms which spirit ever tends to assume. 
 "We measure the growth of spirit by the ideas 
 which inform it. Enormous and mixed popu- 
 lations with a- composite and inharmonious 
 and often misleading culture, make history an 
 apparent confusion. Still universal history is 
 but a record of the growth of spirit, an or- 
 derly process, a legitimate, gesetzmassig de- 
 velopment, an evolution from factors we 
 seek to find. To this process of growth many 
 races have brought an appreciable contribu- 
 tion. 
 
 Between all nations and communities of 
 men there is an importing of thought, a carry- 
 ing from one to another. Even in remote 
 times this was true. For instance, the an- 
 cient ^gean peoples which foreran the Greek 
 seized upon certain forms in the more an- 
 cient Asiatic and Egyptian civilizations, sav- 
 ing and continuing in the godlike and compre- 
 hensive art of a later day the early evolving 
 beauty. More purely in the realm of ideas is 
 the bearing upon, and gift of Orphic mysti- 
 
GIFTS OF THK GREEKS TO OURSELVES 7 
 
 cism to budding Christianity. No people ever 
 takes up a problem where another has laid it 
 down, nor ever takes it up with the same 
 grasp and disposition — race character and 
 race traits forbid. 
 
 Some peoples thrive by whatever might in- 
 heres in them, and then perish according to 
 the law of their organic growth, leaving to 
 later dwellers on this earth little record of 
 their work — ^no more perhaps than some 
 ruined house of a god or of a warrior, or 
 buried shards of folk pottery, or merely the 
 form and inner savings of a serpent-mound. 
 Such nations seemingly have no heirs. The 
 strength and vitality of other peoples, again, 
 pass on and flourish through many times and 
 among alien nations, vast, resurgent factors 
 in evolution. 
 
 It is the fortune of ancient Greece to have 
 thought and wrought for the world. Com- 
 pared with the life of this earth which scien- 
 tists of these days say is not below fifty-five 
 millions of years, and may run into several 
 hundreds of millions, the centuries the spirit 
 of Greece dured in splendid triumph are as 
 the flight of a bird through a summer garden. 
 In that brief moment, however, Greece not 
 
8 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 only wrouglit for generations that liave lived 
 their life upon this earth and died since her 
 strong spirit shone forth, but for whatever 
 generations may continue to think and upon 
 this planet work out their gift to the uni- 
 versal life. She received and rationalized 
 the better part of the content of more ancient 
 civilizations and preserved to us whatever of 
 their substance was true, and she clearly and 
 gloriously inaugTirated the iiew era of the do- 
 minion of mind over nature. 
 
 Much of the most delicate spirit of Hellas, 
 the perfect bloom of her spirit, perished with 
 her ancient free people. Much of what is 
 finest of her growth yields only to patient 
 and arduous study. Yet how vast has been 
 her impetus to us younger peoples, and how 
 greatly have Grreek thought and Greek art 
 and Grreek polities affected our own ! 
 
 The Hellene was the first of western races 
 to think, and to know that what he was doing 
 was thinking. Custom petrified into mean- 
 ingless form, auguries, incantations delivered 
 in cataleptic trance, fa,ntastic outgrowths of 
 the human mind and denying* the very facts 
 of life, negating human sympathy, human 
 equality and human interest — these were the 
 
GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 9 
 
 forms of intellectual life. The Greek was the 
 first to proclaim the sovereign power of ra- 
 tional reflection. Therefore he created sci- 
 ence, scientific method of patient analysis 
 and Tinbiased research, and philosophy. 
 
 The Greek was the first to feel that the 
 beautiful has its own laws, that its cult is the 
 most ennobling pleasure — nay, more than a 
 pleasure, an ideal to be worshiped through all 
 sorrows and toils. The Hellene therefore 
 created art. Before him was only ostentation 
 and ornamentation. 
 
 The Hellene, again, recognized that the 
 good is an end in itself, that the laws of con- 
 duct are the laws of reason. Before the noon- 
 tide of his great day other peoples attempted 
 ethical systems. In Egypt they had a stereo- 
 typed ritual controlled by a priesthood, the 
 people from the king up barren from arid 
 omens, their mental power so weakened by 
 an affluent material civilization that they 
 bartered themselves — slavery and intellectual 
 abnegation in this world for good luck in the 
 world to come ; blessedness in the everlast- 
 ing mansions of an eternal life the priests 
 promised, if the people would here yield to 
 their guidance and follow their counsel. 
 
10 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 In the countries of the orient Chinese seers 
 ■wrought a colossal, iron-grooved ceremonial 
 for the numberless relations of human life — 
 a servile worship of form, reason without 
 sense of human freedom, laws of living suited 
 to a so-called Superior Man. 
 
 Nations of India, struggling for ages to 
 loose the sense of brooding mystery, the 
 mental cramp in which her exuberant, over- 
 awing nature held their spirit, filled with 
 formless yearning after the sublime immen- 
 sity without and rules of human action within, 
 had sunk paralyzed into inactivity, into a 
 comfortless religion fettered with caste, fatal- 
 ism and gods of monstrous form, into silent 
 servility to tradition, prescribed formula and 
 fear to offend the gods by enquiry into causes. 
 Science, literature — knowledge by which they 
 could be free — ^was to the people of India a 
 theological secret kept in the gloom of a 
 temple and subjected to temple inspiration. 
 Impiety alone would prompt the unveiling. 
 Priests, a segregated caste who lived by the 
 altar, received any new gain in human wis- 
 dom^ and reserved it to themselves. 
 
 The story of the Hebrews, told in our Bible, 
 is often saturated with a feeling towards mo- 
 
GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 11 
 
 rality. Its tale testifies that the Hebrews suf- 
 fered frightful lapses in promulgation of 
 human duties. For instance, in the nine- 
 teenth chapter of Leviticus, where the laws of 
 neither dealing falsely, neither lying one to 
 another, nor defrauding thy neighbor, and 
 payment before another day of him that is 
 hired, are followed by the injunction "thou 
 shalt not respect the person of the poor." 
 Both Leviticus and Deuteronomy are rich in 
 promises of material blessings to those walk- 
 ing in the way of the Lord and of disaster to 
 those who forsake that path. Job's friends 
 had at hand such formulas of moral govern- 
 ment. In the old patriarchal theory of life 
 the righteous would be prosperous, the wicked 
 "poor." Desperate sight of the reverse con- 
 dition led later to outcries in certain of the 
 Psalms. All through its course portrayed in 
 the Bible, Israel stood awed before the moral 
 government of the world, and only in a com- 
 paratively late day worked out an ethical 
 cult.i 
 
 ^ "The Israelites were slow in attaining conceptions 
 of sin and at no time prior to the publication of the 
 Gospel were they able to combine their conceptions 
 into coherent doctrines." — Dr. Francis J. Hall, in 
 Evolution and the Fall. 
 
12 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Before the Greeks, throughout the ancient 
 world there was in ethics little save hieratic 
 authority. The Hellenes, unhampered by 
 worship of sacred writings, or by dogmatism 
 of a priest caste, gifted with the instinct 
 which allowed the harmonious unfolding of 
 human powers and capacities, had in their in- 
 born self -limitation guides to morality. Life 
 to them was penetrated with an ethical in- 
 stinct. Their power of analysis — asking in 
 the moral world what they asked in the phys- 
 ical, why should there be human duty, what 
 are the principles of conduct, the law of hu- 
 man action — united to their sense of propor- 
 tion, their sentiment of and feeling for hu- 
 manity, their sensibility to man's function in 
 the social organism, created their dialectic 
 in ethics, their science of morality. 
 
 The Hellene, gifted, we say, with the in- 
 stinct which organized political life and obe- 
 dience to the public spirit of the laws, discov- 
 ered that the state is rational, that its form 
 should correspond to its function, that gov- 
 ernment is, as has been phrased to-day, the 
 corporate reason of the community. Thus he 
 was the first to announce political liberty. 
 Before him society had swerved between des- 
 
GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 13 
 
 potism and anarchy, or, as at times with the 
 Jews, to theocracy. There had been no at- 
 tempt to reconcile the freedom and good of 
 the state and the freedom and good of the in- 
 dividual. The Hellene's practical morality 
 went hand in hand with his civic freedom, and 
 was in fact united to and disciplined by it. 
 
 This, in part, is what Greece gave to the 
 evolution of the spirit of man. These were 
 her factors. And even in the law which pre- 
 vails to-day, the fundamental expansion of 
 which is the real glory of Rome, and in the 
 religion which prevails to-day, the founda- 
 tion of which is an illumination and glory of 
 ancient Judeea, the share of the Greek is 
 great. Without Greece we should never have 
 had the law of Eome. Nor should we have 
 had that religion from Judaea which to-day 
 practices and perpetuates phases of a glowing 
 Greek mysticism and Greek rites and Greek 
 ritual — a religion passing from precepts of 
 ethical conduct, the Sermon on the Mount, to 
 the emphasis of belief in a dogmatic Nicene 
 creed, from the mighty moral enthusiasm of 
 its Teacher to the ethics of the Roman law. 
 
 Greece was master of the intellect of man 
 in the world then known from the spread of 
 
14 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 her ideas in the fourth century hef ore Christ 
 to the time of Justinian, when Plato's acad- 
 emy, the first school of philosophy opened at 
 Athens, was also the last to be closed (529 A. 
 D.). The spirit of Hellas had a complete 
 historic continuity, not by ideas alone but 
 by many definite institutions and works. 
 Fathers of the Church were often trained in 
 old Greek ideas and in the rhetorical methods 
 of itinerant teachers called sophists. Their 
 homily, a fusion of exhortation and teaching, 
 was made after the manner of sophists' public 
 addresses, and as about the sophists disciples 
 and other auditors crowded and acclaimed, so 
 about the great preachers. Greek rhetoric, 
 that is, created the form of the Christian 
 sermon, just as Greek philosophy projected 
 the Christian dogmatic creed. Amid the 
 cloisters and gloom of the Middle Ages a pet- 
 rifaction of Aristotelianism, known as Scho- 
 lasticism, buttressed the doctrines of the 
 Church. Without Greece we should not have 
 had the science which then served stably. 
 Nor in the ninth century a mystic Neo- 
 Platonism finding life's end in ecstasy and 
 rapt contemplation of the divine. Nor 
 should we have had the Eenaissance after 
 
GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 15 
 
 long imprisonment of the spirit of man. 
 Even till to-day Greece is the master of the 
 intellect of man. 
 
 Thus closely are the Greeks our spiritual 
 ancestors. The Greek mind and its products 
 are the first flowering of the European peo- 
 ples. Constructive Greeks set forth the first 
 science, the first art, the first freedom, the 
 first devotion to self-imposed laws, the first' 
 impulse of man to independent stable growth. 
 They were the first people to be free in in- 
 tellect, free in art and free in politics. The 
 saying of Pericles of Athens to his fellow 
 Athenians regarding their colonies may meet 
 broadest application : — "We shall not be with- 
 out witnesses assuredly: mighty documents 
 of our power these are, which shall make us 
 the wonder of ages to come." 
 
 But Greece was not always the land of the 
 spirit. In the rude works of her infancy the 
 vision., of a seer would hardly foresee the 
 height and glory of the Hellenes' prime. 
 The way was to be long, and hundreds of 
 generations were to build with no glimmer of 
 the coming race's glory. Great outpourings 
 of the spirit of life, and any expressive ra- 
 diance to the eyes of men, must for matur- 
 
16 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 iug Jtia,ve not, only time f oj; factor, but also 
 environment. That" tlioy, the Greeks, so 
 mightily surpassed all civilizations of their 
 day is, perhaps, in one measure due to their 
 countiy and the plenitude of life and joy ac- 
 corded them in that land now consecrated 
 from their having evolved and wrought their 
 miracle there. Spiritual energy, ' ' root of be- 
 ing," seems to have found in their life less 
 obstacle to evolution of its reflective reason 
 than elsewhere, and more plastic conditions 
 for expressing itself in beauty through the 
 hand of man. 
 
 The home of this people, of all lands at that 
 point in the evolution of the human race best 
 calculated to further its indwellers' harmo- 
 nious development, included the eastern main- 
 land of Mediterranean Europe, the most 
 western coast of Asia Minor, and the beauti- 
 ful islands that lie between — mountains half- 
 submerged, cutting their way out of the wine- 
 bright sea and seeming to rest like birds upon 
 its waters. In the Greeks' years this sea was 
 the great highway of the world's travel. 
 
 European Greece, the mainland of theirs, 
 projecting far into the ^gean and turning a 
 waiting front towards Asia, was cleft by bar- 
 
GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 17 
 
 bor-seeking waters. That is, a thousand 
 bays and gulfs cut into its coasts. Within, 
 the land lay in countless vales and mountain 
 sides. In some parts a fertile glebe blessed 
 it. In others the scant soil that educates its 
 people for mastership; "not always," said 
 Herodotus at the end of his history, ' ' does the 
 same earth bear wonderful crops and most 
 valiant men. ' ' 
 
 Cereals grew in sunlit tillage, the grape 
 sacred through its use in the religions of 
 many peoples, the gray-green olive, other 
 esculent fruits, and horned cattle grazed in 
 meadows dotted by benefactive forest trees. 
 Here and there healthful and sparkling 
 waters sprang from hillsides and ran in 
 streams to the sea. Above spread a clear 
 and lambent air — it is claimed that the Greek 
 love of precise form resulted from clear-cut 
 outline in their lucid atmosphere. Over all 
 temperateness in climate — at Colonus near 
 Athens the golden eye of the crocus shone 
 through its cup in that month we know as 
 February, and in springtime in green valleys, 
 says Sophocles, the clear-voiced nightingale 
 sang her sweet lament under the dark ivy 
 sacred to Bacchus. 
 
18 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Eesponse to environment is a potent factor 
 in evolution. From this face of nature and 
 its conditions, there was not only the possi- 
 bility, there was a foreordained necessity that 
 here an unparalleled civilization should 
 evolve — ^unless some subtle form of human 
 decay, possibly by endemic parasitic fevers, 
 of which in the earlier days we find no sign, 
 or some disastrous earthquake should cut 
 evolution short. Nature's very chiseling of 
 the main home in hill and bosky hollow, thus 
 making difficult inter-communication by land, 
 proved in early times a furtherer of devel- 
 opment, even if later a fault. It worked 
 against formation of a central government 
 strong enough to control the segregated peo- 
 ples. Each hill was a natural wall to bar out 
 a neighbor wishing to raid for pastime or 
 gain, and led, in a race of such potentialities 
 as the Greeks', to quietude needed for self-de- 
 veloping labor. And it helped make the 
 Greeks seafarers. Each snug valley with its 
 water way had in itself a possible walled mar- 
 ket. The sea's power of easy roadway cut- 
 ting into this compactness threw together the 
 shepherd of the hills, the husbandman of the 
 plain and trading sailor. Here began the 
 
GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 19 
 
 many-sided cultivation of the Greek. A 
 mother-land's slenderness as well as poverty 
 trained her workers to labor and kept out 
 cupidious inraiders. 
 
 When Greek colonies settled in Sicily and 
 neighboring lands of the Mediterranean 
 basin, not unlike conditions prevailed, and 
 with the nascent Greek mind for their plastic 
 material evoked not unlike development. 
 Even the name of one of those clusters of 
 Greek hfe, an old cradle of vigorous broods, 
 Arcadia in the Peloponnesus, albeit the 
 country may now have harsh climate and un- 
 grateful soil, signifies tO' our day teeming 
 pastures and well-wooded mountain-sides 
 watered by cascades and streams, crowned 
 with a temperate and energizing climate and 
 peopled by hardy, clean-limbed, quick-witted 
 dwellers of the soil. 
 
 One of the marvels of this people, one of 
 the miracles of the world's development, is 
 that in the broad, outlying, widely separated 
 lands of Hellas with appalling stretches of 
 water between, a race could keep to its dis- 
 tinction and purity of race spirit, could pre- 
 serve itself even in remote colonies where in- 
 termarriage with neighbor of alien blood 
 
20 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 must have been common. Tlie Greeks were 
 of many tribes and differing dialects, and of 
 the various life-experiences of the rich and 
 the poor. But whatever else they may have 
 been, they were always and invariably Greek 
 — beings endued with a many-sided harmony 
 and growth. 
 
^GEAN PEOPLES FORERUN- 
 NING THE GREEKS 
 
All beginnings are obscure. . . . The sources of his- 
 tory, too, can only be tracked at a footpace. They 
 must be followed to their fount, like the current of a 
 stream which springs ia a mountain fastness. — Theo- 
 DOR GoMPEEZ, in Greek Thinkers. 
 
 The continuity of human development has been such 
 that most, if not all, of the great institutions which still 
 form the framework of civilized society have their roots 
 in savagery, and have been handed down to us in these 
 later days through countless generations, assuming new 
 outward forms in the process of transmission, but re- 
 maining in their inmost core substantially unchanged. — 
 James George Frazer, in Lectures on the Early History 
 of the Kingship. 
 
 We may take it then . . . that the ^gean civilization 
 was indigenous, firmly rooted and strong enough to 
 persist essentially unchanged and dominant in its own 
 geographical area throughout the Neolithic and Bronze 
 Ages. — David George Hogarth, in "^gean Civiliza- 
 tion," Encyclopcedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition. 
 
 22 
 
^GEAN PEOPLES FORERUN- 
 NING THE GREEKS 
 
 Who the Hellenes were, what was their 
 origin, we can not with present-day lenses see. 
 They are plainly a people apart in their pos- 
 sibilities of development, and rnnning back to 
 millennia cut off from our peering and mysti- 
 fied vision by an opaque veil — ^back to that 
 past in which we see but in conjecture various 
 race divergences. Science calls palaeolithic 
 and neolithic their centuries without record 
 save that studiously exhumed. 
 
 Perhaps their main stock had originally 
 come from the south, from Africa, had settled 
 over inviting peninsulas and gone to the 
 northeast, Troad and Phrygia, and westward 
 along the sea's water ways even to Sicily and 
 Spain. It is possible, an archaeologist has 
 suggested, that the western-most settlers had 
 migrated so far back in the years that they 
 journeyed by land from Africa to Italy. In 
 exhumed fragments portrayals of these peo- 
 ples show that they were a dark-haired, dark- 
 23 
 
24 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 eyed race; that they had a completely devel- 
 oped, long, well-balanced head and slender, 
 alert body of medium height. 
 
 There may have been more than one pre- 
 Hellenic stratum in the population. Greeks 
 of historic days called the mysterious, early 
 peoples of the land Pelasgians, "people of 
 the sea." A historian of theirs, Herodotus, 
 who had an ear for folk tradition and the ad- 
 vantage of us by more than twenty- three hun- 
 dred years, declared the Pelasgians and 
 Greeks were one. The blood of the early peo- 
 ples was doubtless a chief element in the his- 
 toric Greeks'. 
 
 Our first record of these evolving peoples, 
 j^gean let us call them, is in remains un- 
 earthed by learned and earnest delvers — in 
 works when these forerunners of the Greeks 
 were still primitive, during the stage of evolu- 
 tion that made axes and arrowheads, saws, 
 combs and beads of stone. In predatory ex- 
 cursions and fights between clans, bronze 
 came gradually into use for weapons of war. 
 Bronze came to serve also for personal adorn- 
 ment, and with clay ntensils for household 
 use. Iron was not yet introduced. But the 
 soil-dweller in that land of a radiant future 
 
iEGEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 25 
 
 had in his bronze a medium which fired his 
 imagination by the possible wonders it put 
 before him. The career of Grreek art had in 
 rude way begun. 
 
 A distinctive mark of the spirit of these 
 early dwellers was the power of forming an 
 ideal and working material towards its reali- 
 zation — a sense of beauty drawing them to- 
 ward material, an instinct to express in their 
 works the ideal form they felt. Also a re- 
 ceptivity of the excellence of others' work, 
 but the subduing the foreign element to their 
 own character. Here may have been the 
 origin of that disposition, aptitude, tempera- 
 ment, which grew as the people evolved, until 
 it became a feeling and mental capacity for 
 measure and loveliness, a productive genius 
 which, when its race was fused with another, 
 worked out universal types surpassing all 
 others — a unique sense of beauty which has 
 never filled the soul of any other people. 
 
 In rude and archaic decoration of lines 
 scratched in plastic clay we have the testi- 
 mony of the childlike early workers' hand. 
 Again in vases not unlike in ornament but 
 made upon the rotating wheel. Then, the 
 evolution of the art being unbroken and the 
 
26 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 triumph, of metal working affecting their 
 ceramics, the adorning more graciously de- 
 veloped by paint upon the buff surface, or by 
 covering the surface with black pigment and 
 drawing on it designs in white and red, and 
 sometimes orange. 
 
 At first in their bronze metal this people 
 made instruments for cutting, such as axes 
 and swords. Also, rudely, statuettes or idols. 
 As the centuries passed and the craft became 
 a part of themselves, that is, when complete 
 knowledge of what they could do with their 
 material gave them the spirit of freedom, 
 their work became more shapely and truer, 
 till at last they wrought of bronze, rings, dag- 
 gers, fibulae, swords of excelling workman- 
 ship and distinction, vessels for ceremonial 
 use; and of gold, buttons, masks, headtire, 
 necklaces and cups before the artistry of 
 which metal workers to-day stand astonished. 
 Their product is not in character ornamental 
 or illustrative : it is ripe art having as its end 
 beauty and truth. Engraved gems also with 
 device of lion, dolphin, ox, goose, chariot, and 
 horse were common in ^gean or pre-Greek 
 centuries as amulets and signets. 
 
 In their masonry and later architecture of 
 
^GEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 27 
 
 vast palaces and tombs these swarming peo- 
 ples, laboring and building for Greece, show 
 to our eyes how they developed the construc- 
 tion of walls — ^first building with rough lime- 
 stone blocks lifted one upon the other with- 
 out regularity or order, set in clay and 
 strengthened with plaster; then with stones 
 carefully hewn and laid in horizontal courses, 
 the medium being mortar; and third, with 
 polygonal masonry. 
 
 The form and perfection of architecture of 
 later Greece is the perfect blossom of an evo- 
 lution begun in this early age. The grace- 
 ful strength of the Doric column may fairly 
 be supposed a development of an earlier col- 
 umn; and the distinctive cella of the Greek 
 temple with its forestanding portico, as well 
 as the gable roof above, is doubtless the ves- 
 tibulum and hall within, and covering of, ruins 
 deemed ancient by the Hellenes. The en- 
 trance of the palace foimd at Tiryns is the 
 plan of the foregate or Propylsea at Athens. 
 
 The art of these early Mediterranean peo- 
 ples was racial and independent, we said. It 
 was not a thing taken on or assumed in cul- 
 tural affectation or imitation. It was genu- 
 inely a product of the gray matter of their 
 
28 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 long heads, of their blood wanning towards 
 the beauty of the world about them, of their 
 imagination and their sense of form inter- 
 preting their religion and their life. It was 
 their overruling endeavor for expressing 
 their adoration and their social feeling — a 
 product of the thought and feeling of their 
 race, however they may have adopted some 
 technical method from contemporaries com- 
 ing to them across the sea. 
 
 Waterfarers brought works from Crete, an 
 island whose folk were doubtless leaders 
 among these ^geans. Also from Tigris- 
 Euphrates states. They brought crafts out 
 of the south, Egypt. Methods of various 
 workers seafarers brought to the childlike 
 forerunners of the Greeks, and the early peo- 
 ples took them into their life, — the technic of 
 the eastern and southern artisan, ways of 
 fashioning in clay and metal, carving and en- 
 graving stones, the Egyptians' spirals and 
 rosettes and masques, and the Assyrian four- 
 spoked wheel of solar light and eternity — that 
 equilateral cross which we moderns call the 
 Greek cross. 
 
 So the ^gean child grew and waxed 
 strong in spirit and the grace of God was 
 
^GEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 29 
 
 upon him. But lie always remained master 
 of Ms dedication to art. From, the grossly 
 rich civilization of the Syrian coast sea- 
 farers, smitten with a strangely un-Semitic 
 love of the sea, might enter his settlement, in 
 the pellucid water that washed his land might 
 gather shells for their Phoenician purple dye, 
 might cut timber for shipbuilding in his 
 forest, and mine silver and copper in his 
 earth. They might scatter engraved gems 
 and bring in wares to exchange for raw prod- 
 uce of his land. Still the child was lord and 
 used the activities of his civilization for his 
 own development. His works were funda- 
 mental, racial, and not in the spirit of a bor- 
 rower. They were common to his own 
 world. 
 
 The culture and craft embodied in and set 
 forth by the works of this people went vari- 
 ously through Europe — to rugged natives of 
 northern forests, and of the then dark and 
 mysterious region beyond — to the Baltic 
 itself, from which the traders brought south 
 the sea's amber, tears, it was later current, 
 of the sister Heliades after they became 
 graceful poplars, tears wept lamenting their 
 brother Phaethon. The traders penetrated 
 
30 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 even beyond the Baltic of transparent waters 
 to what is now Sweden. 
 
 In these earlier centuries, we say, before the 
 god-comrading, heroic age of the Hellenes, the 
 -lEgean sea was alive with keen sailors from 
 Crete, blood-allies of the Greek mainland 
 dwellers, and alive, also, with Phoenicians 
 coming and going to various lands, carrying 
 their activities as far as Britain and its mines, 
 coasting outside the straits joining the Medi- 
 terranean to the Atlantic, perhaps round 
 Africa, and possibly adventuring to the very 
 continent of America. In its homecoming 
 from the west the sea-borne trade m,ay have 
 brought tin for bronze castings — bronze good 
 for weapons of the warrior and for adorning 
 himself and his house. From the east these 
 sailors, whether _^gean or Semitic wealth- 
 seekers, fetched not alone works of older civi- 
 lizations looking to westward outlet — gem-en- 
 graving, gold-working, purple-dyeing, textile 
 fabrics, embroideries. From those latitudes 
 they brought also tale and idol of god and 
 goddess, cults of the world's order and dis- 
 order which those dwellers in what was to be 
 Hellas took to themselves, and in the unroll- 
 ing centuries naturalized and humanized and 
 
yEGEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 31 
 
 SO suffused witli their feeling that the foreign 
 distortion was at last difficult to trace. Thus 
 was the young race tutoring itself and seiz- 
 ing upon all the world of its time could offer. 
 
 In some such eager and industrious life as 
 this the vast content of Hellenic art had slow 
 centuries of earth-bom life. At these times 
 were the art's germination and cotyledonous 
 outshoot. There was an upspringing vigor, 
 and then for centuries a falling away, but the 
 art had always the later Greek independence 
 and grace in its incipient spirit. Fragments 
 of its beginnings form to-day the sole, surviv- 
 ing material of swarming generations and 
 their handiwork through the hundreds of 
 years those generations lived. 
 
 From its modeling in terra cotta and metal 
 work, and also porcelain, this upreaching, 
 pre-Greek civilization is estimated to have had 
 an early splendor in Crete by the middle of 
 the third millennium, and also a renewal 
 about one thousand years later, a renewal, 
 that is, about 1500 before Christ. But dates 
 are uncertain. 
 
 In later centuries of this progress the over- 
 lord housed his power in walls of gigantic 
 build, and upon a height or perhaps command- 
 
32 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 ing a pass for the purpose of levying taxes. 
 Approach to the palace might so lead that an 
 assailant presented his right, unshielded side. 
 Heavy doors admitted to the house. Within, 
 especially of the great hall where noble and 
 retinue met at the seat of public counsel, the 
 walls shone with bronze plates, colored stones 
 and paintings, and possibly with alabaster 
 and glass. "When in richest form, the build- 
 ing had upper stories and light-wells, water 
 pipes, bathrooms and drains. All details 
 witness that it was a spontaneous product 
 suited to joint life of fighter and vassal and 
 household, and that its dwellers wished to give 
 to the daily exercise of life elegance and 
 charm. 
 
 Then as now the best work of the day 
 wrought warfare weapons — they with un- 
 erring art, we with the infinite resources of 
 our science. Then as now women of rich 
 families lived a life often parasitic and 
 guarded. They dwelt in the best-fortified 
 part of the house. Fostered in plenty they 
 clad themselves in garments of gleaming 
 linen and soft woolens stained purple by the 
 famous sea shell. Perhaps they passed their 
 days in embroidering their wear and in weav- 
 
OCEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 33 
 
 ing tapestries. To enhance their natural 
 looks they adorned themselves with the 
 golden headtire, armbands, rings and ear- 
 rings at the craftsmanship of which we 
 marvel. 
 
 Their estimate of life and of the beautiful 
 this folk signified in the care of their dead. 
 As a part of the universal life, they must per- 
 sist after death. Their future life prolonged 
 their present, and those who lived in the 
 splendor of the great hall craved like abode in 
 the life to come. Clothing the bodies for 
 eternity, they laid their dead in massive 
 vaults in a hillside. To the burial they 
 brought astonishing treasure. The soul and 
 its felicity survivors must support and pre- 
 serve. Within the tomb, when it served for 
 a cult to ancestral dead, an altar or some con- 
 duit offered the blood of sacrifices, honey, oil 
 or other food by which the shades might 
 strengthen.^ Because of these tenders the 
 
 ^ This old pre-Greek faith in food-offering to invig- 
 orate the dead was maintained far through Greek cen- 
 turies. In classic Athens, at the feast of the Anthes- 
 teria, was the "offering of pots" when the people set 
 forth all kinds of seeds to souls of ancestors, invoking 
 fertility through their spirits called back from the other 
 world by the seeming upward trend of life in spring. 
 
34 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 dead remained stable friends of the living 
 and gave them counsel. 
 
 Presumably the people dwelling near the 
 palace were in some sort of feudal pledge to 
 the family of the great house and the tomb. 
 Countless thousands of workers must have 
 labored at bridge, roadway and drainage 
 building, in grain-field, in olive culture, in 
 vineyard, ia cattle-shed, at the loom, at pot- 
 ters' wheel, at bronze smelting vessel and 
 mold, at the spit, at the mill and bread oven 
 of the great house, for their sustenance. Of 
 these myriads upon myriads of toilers 
 throughout untold generations supporting the 
 
 Graves at Athens, down to their third century before 
 Christ, show the dead were provided with food and wine. 
 Unquestionably the practice went on later. 
 
 To-day the significant custom of such offering is 
 broadly practiced. In Greece food and wine are now 
 buried with those who, as Homer sang, "sleep the brazen 
 sleep," and for three years "the unsleeping lamp" is 
 kept burning by the grave. Among other peoples, in 
 parts of Lithuania for instance, peasants to this day 
 set viands beside the graves of their kin. Lately, in the 
 city of New York, a housemaid daily put aside a plate 
 of food to strengthen the spirit of her brother, who 
 some weeks before had died at her family home in Ire- 
 land. The Chinese of Chicago, keeping their "Feast 
 of the Dead," set baskets of roast pig, chicken, duck, 
 
^GEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 35 
 
 palace family and retinue, and of their liv- 
 ing, we have remains in bronze hairpins, 
 knives, rings, brooches, double-headed axes, 
 spearheads, figures of men, women and 
 chariots — offered and dedicated at shrines, 
 for they had no temples — ^in figurines of 
 stone, ivory, faience and other material from 
 their burying grounds. But the people en- 
 dure chiefly in the altruism of their works 
 made in obedience to the power of the nobles. 
 "They maintained the fabric of their world. 
 And in the handiwork of their craft was their 
 prayer. ' ' Their Mother Earth of which they 
 claimed to be the children absorbed their 
 
 salted meats and fish, ■watermelon seeds, eakes and other 
 food by the graves of their countrymen buried there. 
 And faith in the abiding of souls of the dead in 
 places of burial of the body has appreciably affected 
 life in our own country. Belief that the soul waited 
 the Resurrection Morning in its body's resting place (a 
 belief migrating from England with generations in man- 
 hood with Shakespeare) — such folk-feeling kept many a 
 New England family from "moving west" as a whole. 
 A conviction, feeling rather than any reasoned-out state- 
 ment, was broad-spread — ^that of the duty of some mem- 
 ber of the family to stay by the relatives' graves in the 
 old farm, or village burying-ground, to keep dutiful 
 companionship with parents, sister, child, and finally to 
 join them in the same consecrated soil. This sentiment 
 
36 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 bodies, and mayliap the immortality of tliein 
 rested in their Underworld. 
 
 That consciousness of a mysterious, vitaliz- 
 ing force in nature which was, for centuries 
 uniting with another people's faith, to pro- 
 duce the exquisite religious personifications 
 of the heroic age, that religious instinct to 
 draw the divine to one's self and explain 
 motion of life in bodies of sky or earth by 
 conceiving an unseen spirit dwelling in the 
 object, informed the soul of this people. A 
 matriarchal religion had sway. The Prin- 
 
 seems to imply the faith that an invisible soul, gifted 
 with consciousness, abode near the grave and was gTati- 
 fied by the association. 
 
 The sentiment of the iEgean folk of the bronze age 
 that the soul dwelt in the grave and in the remains of 
 the living form, had a logical outcome we are apt to 
 overlook : that therefore from the bones might be gained 
 a grace of spirit that had originally dwelt in the living 
 person. Here doubtless arose the ascription of power 
 to the bones of a notable person, a faith surviving to 
 later Greek centuries. Bones of Orestes, for instance, 
 were removed to Sparta in historic times in order to 
 attract the soul of the hero and help the state to victori- 
 ous arms. With such faith was united belief in an 
 actual physical effluence, a healing virtue passing to per- 
 sons and things by contact, the worship of "relics," a 
 sentiment entertained among us to-day. 
 
^GEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 37 
 
 ciple ruling in their smiling land, the mystery 
 of fecund nature, they personified as a 
 woman. To her unwed was subordinated a 
 son of whom she became the mother by im- 
 maculate conception. The earth in divers 
 forms and phases expressed their Great God- 
 dess — Reproductive Fertility, mother of all 
 living things, a Maiden, but with the seed and 
 bearing harvests she became Mother. Other 
 emblems of fertility and generation, such as 
 the bull-man, and snake goddess, doubtless 
 represented minor gods. Symbolic objects, 
 such as horns, trees, axes, crosses and pillars 
 were common in Crete. It is believed no 
 sacerdotalism prevailed. The lord of the 
 stronghold may have been high-priest. From 
 women as ministrants probably descended 
 legends of the Amazons. Every settlement 
 of that ^gean folk had its rites in which its 
 dutiful people praised and worshiped "Our 
 Lady" — Mother Earth and their land's meed 
 of corn and fruitfulness. The goddess lived 
 into Greek centuries. In Athens she became 
 tutelary in the form of the maiden Pallas 
 Athene, and in other places in forms of 
 Artemis, Aphrodite, Here. At Eleusis she 
 remained Demeter, Earth Mother. Under 
 
38 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 othtr names faith in her and usage of her 
 fertility figure, as of her of the many breasts 
 at Ephesus, persisted to Christian centuries, 
 and still to-day persist in Mediterranean 
 countries. 
 
 United with this matriarchal religion there 
 is supposed to have been, at least in the 
 earlier centuries of the period, a domestic 
 life in which house property belonged to the 
 women of the family, and descended from 
 mother to daughter; in relationship the 
 father not being reckoned ; sons and brothers 
 going off to serve and marry women who had 
 land in other communities. 
 
 Thus many fertile, diligent hundreds of 
 years, — ^gean, pre-Greek — seem to have 
 unrolled. The people's early civilization 
 pressed onward. Eemains of their life would 
 testify that they were a peace-loving folk. 
 But those who first fought with knife of 
 stone, and bow and arrow, had come to use 
 lance and dagger and sword in taking life of 
 human opponent, or in leading him to the en- 
 slavement of the subdued. The evolution of 
 such an armory needs many generations. 
 
 But with that feeling upward or outward, 
 perhaps a forerunner of that sense of race 
 
^GEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 39 
 
 vocation of wMch the oncoming Greeks were 
 to be conscious, a new and definite order was 
 slowly prevailing. During centuries some 
 power had been disturbing the ant-like set- 
 tlements over those broadly separated lands. 
 Their poise was gradually changing. The 
 life-habits of the old people, a people of dis- 
 tinct and rational customs whose influence 
 would long outlast their overthrow and react 
 against their conquerors, were passing. A 
 new folk was coming uppermost, a ruling peo- 
 ple doubtless dominant by right of conquest. 
 They possessed a metal through which they 
 forged forward. The age of the use of iron 
 was beginning. 
 
 In endless iteration and through thou- 
 sands of years a tale has told itself — of peo- 
 ples of the north, obedient to the n eyer-dyja g 
 longing oi, north erner s for^e -gouth, send- 
 ing toward the sun wave after wave of their 
 children, and conquering. They hold the 
 strength of conquest for a brief day, and then 
 their domination melts in the warmth for 
 whose gifts they left their rugged seats. 
 Those subdued, often of more material ideas 
 than the conquerors, reassert themselves by 
 absorbing their victors' blood. The lords 
 
40 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 overcome witli the luxury of conquest, forget- 
 ful of the idealism or quest of power that 
 made them conquerors, far outnumbered and 
 outweighed by their subjects, die out like 
 all aristocracies, or are lost in amalgama- 
 tion. 
 
 Undoubtedly golden-haired Teutons, whom 
 the ancients called Celts, a mobile, surging, 
 energetic folk, loving dominion and the order- 
 ing of dominion, sought ^gean lands and 
 seized upon and in part energized, in part 
 wiped out, the old civilization, the old peace- 
 lovers. The northerners bore their arts with 
 them. Such equipage of life as the heroic 
 kings of Homer's song have in our time been 
 unearthed in Bosnia, in Styria, in Carniola 
 and other countries — armor, weapons and 
 adornment and sepulture indicating the faith 
 of Homer's Achseans. 
 
 In other words, during many centuries 
 these ^gean peoples were evolving their 
 characteristic art and life, bands of fair- 
 haired folk clustering perhaps even to the 
 shores of the northern ocean had turned 
 obedient to the call of the south, and again 
 and again had pressed into the regions 
 lighted and warmed by the sun and -^gean 
 
OCEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 41 
 
 waters. These tribes of the northern and 
 central regions of Europe, primitive, political 
 communities, subject to no law but loyalty to 
 the community and obedience to the com- 
 munity 's power, were organized for collective 
 and almost perpetual pugnacity. Among 
 them chronic warfare, by a process of selec- 
 tion, weeded out the less energetic and pro- 
 duced the most war-loving and terrible 
 fighters the world has ever seen. A naming 
 of certain spiritual qualities of theirs is worth 
 impress upon our memory for we shall meet 
 their Germanic characteristics directing 
 Greek life in succeeding times — fundamental 
 considerations of conscientious conduct, a 
 puritan rigor, and a genius for social organi- 
 zation. 
 
 Those were the days of the uprootings of 
 peoples. The mountains which practically 
 cap the southlands the adventurers of fortune 
 swept over, bearing oftentimes with them 
 the broad-skulled, brown-complexioned men 
 dwelling on the mountains. Becoming mas- 
 ters of a part of the vine-country of the 
 ^gean, and of its richness, they asserted 
 their lordship. At the end of the slaughter 
 of defending men, the invaders took the 
 
42 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 women and children of the settlements they 
 had disrupted and formed a new home, 
 leaders of the freebooters marrying the 
 daughters, or wives, of the native lords. 
 
 The northerners had brought with them 
 their patriarchal rule subversive of the old 
 matrilineal system, and their traditions of 
 marriage. Also their northern energy, their 
 spirit of order and of government, and so 
 virile and ingratiating an Aryan speech that 
 they implanted it in their chosen abodes and 
 within the use of the conquered people. They 
 brought also love of the lay, and the bard 
 to make and sing the saga. These people we 
 call Achffians. Their consciousness was des- 
 tined to form one wing of that uranic spirit 
 we call Greek. Zeus, sky-father, god of the 
 heavens was theirs, and also shining Apollo, 
 the sun. Such divinities succeeded as dom- 
 inating gods the old ^gean deity. Pro- 
 ductive Nature, the embodying of the su- 
 preme soul in Mother Earth and in minor 
 gods and symbols. 
 
 These events happened when the culture of 
 the pre-Hellenic ^geans, the hypothetic 
 evolution of which we have bespoken, was at 
 its height. In the great epic age to which 
 
jEGEANS forerunning the greeks 43 
 
 we are coming, we hear of the yellow-haired 
 rulers called Achseans, of their tall stature, 
 of their round shields and bronze greaves 
 and hauberks, of their brooches and other 
 body ornaments, of their use of iron, of the 
 bumiug of their dead — all evidencing a cul- 
 ture different from and independent of the 
 -iEgean. 
 
 A people other than the early tribes of the 
 Greek lands had made their way into that 
 country set aside for a splendid development 
 of the human spirit, and themselves master 
 of its population. In this way doubtless 
 came into being the age of the dominant 
 Achseans, feudal lords dwelling, as lords 
 dwelt at the end of the pre-Greek age, their 
 citadel a palace set on a windy height, or in 
 a mountain pass, their vassals and the people 
 they had conquered, the people who swelled 
 their following, dwelling in outlying plain 
 and meadow. 
 
 "With the new race established in Greece 
 came the use of iron. Doubtless with iron 
 fully developed came more contention, strife, 
 the warlike mood which weapons of the metal 
 support and which was doubtless still in the 
 hearts of the migrators. 
 
HEROIC AGE OF THE GREEKS 
 
Warum waren die aufgeklarten Grieclien in der Welt? 
 Weil sie da waren und unter solchen Umstanden nicht 
 anders als aufgeklarte Grieclien seyn konnten. — Herder, 
 in Ideen zur PMlosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. 
 
 There is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which 
 always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in 
 history as one constant epic. . . . 
 
 The demonstration of the advance of knowledge and 
 the development of ideas . . . are the charter of prog- 
 ress and the vital spark of history. — Lord Acton, in 
 A Lecture on the Study of History. 
 
 The study of classical literature is probably on the 
 decline; but whatever may be the fate of this study in 
 general, it is certain that . . . attention will be more 
 and more directed to the poetry of Homer . . . 
 
 Homer should be approached ... in the simplest 
 frame of mind possible. Modem sentiment tries to 
 make the ancient not less than the modem world its 
 own; but against modern sentiment in its applications 
 to Homer the translator, if he would feel Homer truly 
 . . . cannot be too much on his guard. — ^Matthew 
 Arnold, in On Translating Homer. 
 
 46 
 
HEROIC AGE OF THE GREEKS 
 
 We are already within the heroic age of 
 Hellas, an age sung and written of as no other 
 single period in the world's history — an age 
 that stood to later Hellas somewhat as the 
 age of old Germanic epics stands to modern 
 Germanic peoples. From now on we have 
 the people we may refer to as Greek, or Hel- 
 lenes. They were already, even in this 
 earlier time, so far racially characterized as 
 to show a specific difference between them- 
 selves and any other stock. 
 
 To comprehend them we must set aside our 
 daily habits of feeling, orienting our minds 
 to their point of view. We must readjust 
 whatever world-weary emotional and intel- 
 lectual phases we may have. We can ap- 
 proach them only by saturating our con- 
 sciousness with their early and elemental 
 vigor and their imaginative curiosity and joy. 
 
 At the very beginning of their recorded 
 history we find the old Greek what for us 
 he has always remained — a rational creature 
 and the representative of a rational civiliza- 
 
 47 
 
48 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 tion. He already loved the splendor of tlie 
 world, its brilliance, its beauty. He bad an 
 exalted joy in living. He revered the hu- 
 man form and tbe individual being of whom 
 that form was a part. He already bad a 
 sense of sy mm etry, moderation. His art be 
 bad already planted in tbe laws of tbe beauti- 
 ful, as bis life in tbe laws of reason. His 
 qualities and bis circumstances agreed and 
 be bad tbe inevitable offspring, joyous, opti- 
 mistic barmony. 
 
 "Witbin Hellas, tben, and with conditions 
 already set forth, was inaugurated tbe age 
 we call tbe Greek epic. In tbe pages of 
 Homer we view its magnificent panorama. 
 Tbe genuineness of tbe old poet's record as 
 to events and sources is of least importance. 
 His realism vouches for his absolute delinea- 
 tion of life and manners. His tales of Troy 
 and tbe heroes and heroines about the town 
 bad been handed down among bis fellow 
 lonians, by legend of mouth and by song, 
 long before bis genius composed the match- 
 less epic singing tbe ways of gods to men, 
 and his immortal voice first chanted bis lays. 
 Homer came at tbe end of a period, at tbe 
 twilight of a long day. 
 
RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 49 
 
 To characterize an age we must consider 
 it under the heads of religion, polity, moral 
 ideas and art. These are the peculiar prod- 
 ucts of the spirit of a race — hke flora and 
 fauna they are determined by soil and 
 climate. They can not be borrowed, as may 
 industry and applied science, without loss of 
 character. 
 
 Through thousands of years of the stone 
 and bronze ages progenitors of the Hellenes 
 had been evoking the pantheon of Greece 
 from the phenomena of nature — from the 
 fruitful energy of the soil, the processions of 
 the seasons, the shining expanse of the all- 
 encompassing sky, the virgin splendor of the 
 air, the "all-seeing cyclic sun," the cavern- 
 ous darkness of the underworld, the ever- 
 sleepless stream of ocean. Early peoples had 
 stood mystified, revering these appearances 
 before they personified them.^ All was God 
 to this young humanity passing from the 
 race's childhood. 
 
 ^ The imaginative and poetic mind of the American 
 Indian had this quality. "The red man prefers to be- 
 lieve that the Spirit of God is not breathed into man 
 alone, but that the whole created universe is a sharer in 
 the immortal perfection of its maker." — Dr. ChI^rles 
 Alexander Eastman in The Soul of the Indian. ' 
 
50 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 As to a child to-day inert things had per- 
 sonal attributes. A spirit indwelling under 
 the surface came to t"he sight of men — ^in per- 
 sonal forms and as separate and varied as 
 the phenomena of nature. To their loving 
 awe all manifested God — green forests, 
 laughing valleys. Every mountain peak, 
 cave, wind-swept plain and ridge was quick 
 with the divine. An oak might be the home 
 of a god, as at Dodona, and his hallowed 
 voice heard from its leaves and trunk. Dry- 
 ads haunted woods, and nymphs half-divine 
 yet not deathless animated poplar, pine, 
 laurel, olive, fig-tree, the plane, from their 
 birth in the forest — ^not only trees but reeds, 
 hyacinths and other growths. And when the 
 day came for the growth to perish, its soul 
 fled from the light of the sun. Water itself 
 had a divinity, the fertility borne by a bub- 
 bling spring or a leaping brook, a spirit or 
 naiad. Looking with the imaginative eye, 
 the Hellenes saw gods in swelling and bene- 
 factive rivers, and in the stream that sinks 
 below the surface and reappears after flow- 
 ing underground. Their conceptions they 
 humanized till the grace and beauty and 
 frolic of the beings became real, not an ab- 
 
RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 51 
 
 straction. Nereids and Tritons coming from 
 the sea blew wreathed horns. The pan-psy- 
 chism of certain philosophers of to-day, a 
 vitalizing of nature, claim, of the existence 
 of a world-soul in even lowest forms of 
 nature, a theory of the non-human nature en- 
 joying an interior life — such a faith was the 
 basis of the Hellene's anthropomorphizing 
 tendency. 
 
 This primitive god-maker amazed, in won- 
 der before natural causes and gifted with 
 keen senses and lively imagination, feeling in 
 his heart that man is the highest expression 
 of nature, fancied creatures like himself, but 
 larger and more powerful than he, must be 
 behind those appearances. He had not yet 
 become enough of a metaphysician to inquire 
 into the grounds of the sacred awe with 
 which the living forces of a mysterious world 
 inspired him. When his lucid intelligence 
 clothed these forces and the whole body of 
 nature in human form, he gave evidence that 
 he found in them his own spirit, that he 
 was not alien to the all-life, and he recog- 
 nized his kinship with the world. He 
 showed that in his day and country, man no 
 longer cowered before the powers of nature 
 
52 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 as things incompreliensible and strange, a 
 mystery apart from himself. 
 
 Even the discriminating reason of man the 
 Hellene came to view as a natural phenom- 
 enon, and as a militant and aggressive prin- 
 ciple personified it in the gray-eyed daugh- 
 ter of Zeus, Pallas Athene; in its loftier 
 prophetic and aesthetic functions in shining 
 Apollo. And the social unity which formed 
 the hearth by which he sat in homely com- 
 fort he enshrined as a goddess. Zeus him- 
 self, the god of the bright aether, son of the 
 Ancient of Days — not the Eternal, the Abid- 
 ing God — ^was also god of man's upward-striv- 
 ing spirit.^ 
 
 Seers and prophets of the race, ' ' medicine- 
 men" some writers of to-day delight to name 
 them, had shaped certain gods in dim out- 
 line in far-back ages, in the Urzeit of the Hel- 
 lenes and their kindred peoples. Outlines of 
 
 ^ A present-day evangel speaking of "the ideal power 
 with which we feel ourselves in connection, the 'God' of 
 ordinary men," curiously re-echoes Greek conceptions. 
 "We can experience union with something larger than 
 ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace," 
 wrote Mr. James in "The Varieties of Religious Experi- 
 ence." "This something need not be infinite, it need not 
 be solitary. It might conceivably be only a larger and 
 
RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 53 
 
 sundry Greek gods existed in the pantheon 
 of races akin to the Greeks. Apollo, the 
 sun-god, Zeus-pater, sky-father and some- 
 times spirit of fertility, were common to 
 many.^ But the divinities were amorphous; 
 they had no definite lines or ethical qualities. 
 The peculiar product of the imagination of 
 the early day of the Greeks was the definite, 
 vigorous, vivid, human-like, living forms of 
 their gods— their bringing the divine element 
 within the comprehension of their folk-mind, 
 their ensouling mysteries of nature and of 
 man 's spirit in human form. 
 
 As their civilization advanced the early 
 personifications of the race, as would happen 
 
 more godlike self . . . and the universe might conceiv- 
 ably be a collection of such selves. . . . Thus would a 
 sort of polytheism return upon us. ... I think, in fact, 
 that a final philosophy of religion will have to recon- 
 sider the pluralistic hypothesis more seriously than it 
 has hitherto been willing to consider it." The eminent 
 naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, has set forth a not 
 unsimilar conception as "in harmony with the universal 
 teaching of Nature." 
 
 ^ "First there is the earth, and the sun, and the stars, 
 and the whole universe, and the goodly order of the sea- 
 sons, and the divisions into years and months; and that 
 all Hellenes and barbarians alike consider them to be 
 gods," wrote Plato in his "Laws." 
 
54 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 from the associative laws of mind, grew 
 more and more in definite human attributes — 
 in the veins of the exalted physical beings 
 ichor, not blood, would flow, and rather than 
 the pleasures of mortals' offerings, they 
 would enjoy their own peculiar food of nec- 
 tar and ambrosia. And in the process of 
 making the conception personal and genial — 
 in the humanizing metamorphosis, the form- 
 ing an ideal of humanity — divinities woiild 
 gain a history, which is to say the popular 
 mind would endow them with action and 
 passion. If we recall that the Greeks' gods 
 had natural appetites, we must also remem- 
 ber that natural appetites were regarded by 
 that people whose life was moderated with 
 awe for limit and horror at exaggeration and 
 impiety, whose axioms of moral and physical 
 self -limitation became laws of conduct quoted 
 for centuries and to this day — ^natural appe- 
 tites were regarded more noble by those an- 
 cient children of out-of-doors and out-door 
 phenomena than by peoples to-day. Hand 
 in hand with their anthropomorphism com- 
 monly went ethical promptings against ex- 
 cess. 
 The dim, great might of nature shines 
 
RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 55 
 
 through the radiant forms of Homer's gods. 
 But in his heroes, too, we feel the pulsing of 
 those very powers. Both gods and men are 
 the children of one unsearchable source of 
 life. Mysticism, enthusiasm, penance, have 
 no place in this world. Man adores his 
 radiant ideals as naturally as he gladdens in 
 the light of the sun^ There is no sense of 
 sin — ^haunting consciousness of moral imper- 
 fection and apartness from God. Eyes are 
 fixed on this world and the heroic Hellenes 
 are face to face with the invisible. 
 
 In their joyous sense of life, psyche, (po^'j 
 or soul, receded. The active and actual ab- 
 sorbed them. Peoples of the north in cli- 
 matic pressure of frost and fog, and forced to 
 long periods of inaction, found vent of energy 
 in introspection which brought immortal- 
 ity near. Not so the early Hellene. Ionia 
 which produced his epic song had the softest 
 and mildest climate of all Greece, said 
 Herodotus. The sun stirring the Hellene's 
 purple sea, and impelling his broad-bosomed 
 earth to her bounty, lifted him out of imagin- 
 ings about another life, and made his after 
 world a shadowy thing. His soul would cross 
 Oceanus or Styx in its passage to the "cold" 
 
56 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 and "mouldering" kingdom of tlie dead, Ere- 
 bus, ruled over by Hades and Persepbone. 
 Tbere among tbe "people of tbe earth" bis 
 life would be a spectral copy of what be found 
 here. 
 
 Tbese people often burned tbeir dead, in 
 this custom perhaps preserving the needs of 
 the early northern migrators, who, passing 
 through densely wooded countries, must burn 
 in order to preserve the body from outrage 
 and dishonoring mutilation. For because of 
 the possessions the marauders had seized, the 
 resident folk would be fiercely vindictive. 
 Then too there were the devouring creatures 
 of the wild. 
 
 The burning of the body shows the idea 
 prevailed of a separate abode for the spirit. 
 The soul will never return to its earthly sub- 
 stance. But until the burning it flits between 
 its late dwelling and the invisible world be- 
 low. Fire, the purifier, immaterial matter, 
 detaches the soul from its corporeal cover and 
 bears it to yonder world. "Thou dost 
 sleep, Achilles, and hast forgotten me," 
 cries the soul of the beloved Patroclus; "not 
 in my life but in my death hast thou been 
 unmindful of nie. Bury me that I may pass 
 
RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 57 
 
 the gates of Hades, when thou hast given me 
 my due of fire. ' ' The slaying of twelve Tro- 
 jan youths at the funeral rites of Patroclus 
 may have been a survival of the faith, to 
 which we have already referred, of strength- 
 ening with blood a soul that had passed to 
 the infernal deities. 
 
 To the Elysian fields and ends of the earth 
 the gods translated a favored few, "where 
 golden-haired Ehadamanthus dwells, where 
 life is easiest for mortals; no falling snows 
 there, nor lingering winter, nor storm, but 
 ever the airs of the western wind breathing 
 softly to lift the souls of men." 
 
 The soul as well as the body of the Greeks 
 is in their myths of the gods. To the plastic 
 genius of those Hellenes more than to any 
 other people the world was alive. To them, 
 because of their active minds, their creative 
 energy, the vigor of their imagination, it was 
 given more than others to stamp their race 
 spirit and genius upon early products. Al- 
 ready in Homer the Greeks were idealists. 
 
 Approach to the great gods was open to 
 all by sacrifice and prayer — that is, by gift 
 and petition. Each human child might come 
 direct to his divinities, calling by name upon 
 
58 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 that god whose help he felt he needed. The 
 offering was a bribe, not so much in thanks 
 for favors past, but as even now among the 
 more primitive-minded of us, a gift to change 
 the holy one's hostility to the petitioner's 
 desires. Prayer was to him an asking. Lift- 
 ing cleansed hands and arms frankly to 
 heaven in manner of a petitioner, the Greeks 
 prayed standing. No servile genuflexion, no 
 oriental salaam prostrated his body. His 
 sense of human worth permitted no abnega- 
 tion nor concealing himself with a veil in the 
 presence of his divinity. The Hellenes found 
 no opposition to a supreme power in their 
 fresh, god-given life, and needed no mediator 
 between themselves and the infinite. 
 
 No sacerdotal caste flourished. There were 
 indeed servants of the gods who declared the 
 gods' will to men. Probably their service 
 had evolved from the magic-efforts of the 
 earlier wonder-worker or medicine-man. But 
 now the servants spoke through the gift of a 
 God-consciousness clearer than that of other 
 men's — that was the ground of the reverence 
 borne him — not by the privilege of a caste. 
 Certain families possessed the exclusive exer- 
 cise of certain rites, and occasional priests 
 
RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 59 
 
 and priestesses had the keepers' charge of 
 temples and chanted liturgies. The office of 
 these men and women was sacred, but their 
 persons only when engaged in the service of 
 the shrine. Association between shrines was 
 not organized, and the priests never came 
 to the strength of a corporate union. They 
 were not given an esoteric training that set 
 them mentally apart from their people. It 
 is evident that they were not ordained to their 
 function by any elaboration. They had small 
 compelling influence. They had no entrance 
 to the private life of the family. They were 
 not guiders of women or teachers of youth. 
 They were not necessary in war. They were 
 not theologians — the poet or rhapsodist was 
 that. Even in this epic age the Greek guarded 
 his intellectual independence. 
 
 Thus the Greek of the heroic age lived in 
 a world of mysterious origin made beautiful 
 and near to him by the. companionship of 
 splendid, immortal gods. They gave him all 
 fair things^ — ^wisdom, righteousness, courage, 
 beauty, food, well-being. Unrestrained re- 
 ligious feeling saturated his every task, every 
 joy, every institution of life. The immortal 
 was ever near to "start upon the soul in 
 
,60 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 sweet surprises." "All men need the gods," 
 said Homer. Their power was a shield be- 
 tween the Hellene and the inscrutable forces 
 from which he and they had sprung. They 
 were a defense from ill. They fought in 
 men's battles and guided men's voyagings. 
 Without their help nothing could prosper. 
 Men and gods belonged to a common society. 
 All wrought for a common end. Their powers 
 differed. The immortals, like the people's 
 group life, were deathless. 
 
 Gods found it sweet and no loss of honor 
 or dignity to accept human reverence and 
 homage, and to share men's feasts and men's 
 sports. In return for their bounty mortals 
 venerated the gods and offered them gifts and 
 food. Immortals in a presence shared every 
 meal. This might have been, doubtless was, 
 a survival of a usage from primitive times 
 when, since food is the main support of life, 
 sacraments took the form of a meal. 
 
 Every slaughter was an offering and every 
 meal a feast with a god. The ways of 
 human kind were good for the gods' associ- 
 ation and the earth for them to go about upon. 
 They loved the community. "Without the 
 gods' membership the group is not thinkable. 
 
RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 61 
 
 Nor were the gods without the group's 
 loyalty. 
 
 Lordly ancestors the gods were often es- 
 teemed — broadly, in evolutionary view, that 
 in fact they were, a product of the com- 
 munity's spirit and in reaction the commu- 
 nity of the gods' — and their interest in the 
 lives of men might lie in their character of 
 progenitors. "Father Zeus!" often cries 
 Homer, "Father of men and immortals!" 
 And centuries after this heroic epic, Pindar 
 sang of the race of gods and men, "from one 
 mother we both draw breath of life. ' ' Plato 
 later still embodied these conceptions when 
 he wrote, "Wise men say that one community 
 embraces heaven and earth and gods and men 
 and friendship and order and temperance 
 and righteousness, and for that reason they 
 call this whole a universe." 
 
 What a luster it cast upon the race to be 
 the children — ^not the creatures — of their di- 
 vinities! The mysterious tie of nature and 
 of the community, older even than the gods, 
 bound gods and men together. Gods and 
 men formed an organized social unit. Duties 
 to, and rights of, men factored as well as 
 duties to and right ways toward gods. We 
 
62 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 must enter into tlie sentiment deeply if we 
 would realize the loftiest elements of the 
 heroic consciousness. 
 
 Such was the heroic Greeks' religion — a 
 nexus of imagination and feeling and thought, 
 rudimentary, wrought out by race wonder- 
 workers, race thinkers and race poets; a 
 growth, we must remember, before recorded 
 history, one of those instances in evolution 
 when sound conclusions come from false 
 premises, a more perfect form unexpectedly 
 develops from the imperfect. It was old and 
 taking on decay even at Homer's singing. 
 In its substance we have the race's sense of 
 beauty, their feeling of the closeness of na- 
 ture — its very parenthood to them — the 
 effervescing imagination of the one who sees 
 the world anew, and the foreshadowing grop- 
 ing for the moral solution of life with which 
 the Hellenes' later works were so completely 
 saturated. Studying this early religion 
 sympathetically, we see how in the radiant, 
 dissolving forms of immortals the very emo- 
 tions and ideas of our religious feeling of to- 
 day — feeling which we are now apt to chain 
 under the hardened crust of dogma — then 
 played generously and freely. A spirit sin- 
 
THE STATE 63 
 
 gle, omniscient, omnipotent, inaccessible, too 
 remote for Ms intimacies and communion was 
 afar from the Greek's conception. 
 
 The heroic Greek's state was nothing dis- 
 tinct from his religion. It was the rule of a 
 king, or feudal lord or chief of clan. Per- 
 haps he was a son of a god, or of a strange, 
 strong man from the north. Socially he may 
 have been descended from a primitive prac- 
 ticer of magic or other religious office for the 
 benefit of the group. If his evolution were 
 such, in making it he had needed to be able, 
 acute, acquisitive of authority and riches, re- 
 alizing the force he had acquired through 
 prestige of knowledge of the divine and ca- 
 pable of carrying that prestige to politics. 
 Whatever his growth, he was esteemed more 
 nearly descended from Poseidon or Zeus than 
 his people. The subject mass could not have 
 such legends of descent. Therefore tradi- 
 tions in later times would conflict; voicing 
 the old ^gean people they would speak of 
 "earth-born men," again of men as sons of 
 the chief god or as creatures of Prometheus. 
 The genuine Greek creed is doubtless that 
 which makes the ancestor of the race a son 
 of Zeus. 
 
/64 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Thus it came that the divine chief, or king, 
 was an oracle of justice — Homer said he had 
 a Zeus-given scepter — and the source of 
 authority in preserving the principles and 
 laws custom had established. But among the 
 Hellenes this prestige could not degenerate 
 into an absolutism. Gods themselves were 
 not infallible ; much less their sons. The tra- 
 ditions of the race, and precedent of the law, 
 the utterance of their prophets, and will of 
 the council of elders and of the whole people 
 were forces not to be set aside by the royal 
 word. We behold the heroic Greek even in 
 war deliberating upon their common interest, 
 the people present and expressing their ap- 
 proval or disapproval — the germ of their 
 democracy to come. Even then it was Greek 
 to be master of one's situation, of one's self; 
 nothing must be withdrawn altogether from 
 ihe determination of common reason. The 
 Greeks' religious consciousness posits as a 
 necessity for all time political independence. 
 Zeus took away half of a man's virtue when 
 days of slavery laid hold of him, said Homer. 
 
 Every government is founded upon an 
 original democracy. That later analyst of 
 Greek polities, Aristotle, conceived the origin 
 
THE STATE 65 
 
 of the Greek monarchy in a reward to some 
 well-worker of the people, out of loyalty con- 
 tinued to his offspring. In Homeric song 
 the king was king by the free consent of the 
 governed, whether he was lord of a city of 
 rural habits, or chief of a more open valley 
 clan. His functions were not arbitrary. 
 Eather his strength was indefinite — ^uncon- 
 fined by limits. His constitutional rights, his 
 headship founded on social sentiment, phys- 
 ical as well as mental prowess must support. 
 He represented the collective action and emo- 
 tion of his people before the gods and offered 
 prayer at a large sacrifice — a tribal meal 
 with some god. He was leader in war. For 
 such services he received tributes of cattle, 
 the honor part of the booty, a portion of 
 land, and other rich gifts. His council of 
 elders was of men reputable and experienced, 
 already past the age of the flourishing war- 
 rior. They sat at meat with the king, ad- 
 vised with him upon the common weal and 
 with him determined disputes about property 
 — mainly property because thievery caught 
 in the act met punishment by death without 
 trial, and the revenge of murder lay with the 
 family. 
 
66 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 The state in this stage of the national life 
 had not been the subject of reflection and had 
 no formtilated object. It was doubtless a 
 growth from primitive groupings for pro- 
 tection, a loosely united clan, a free union of 
 the people, rather than a working, ordered, 
 corporate thing, — an order justified by the 
 majesty of itself and the economic needs of 
 the day. The rule of heroes was a necessity, 
 if not for those governed, at least for the 
 full manifestation of the heroic character. 
 
 But most important for determining the 
 true index of an age, namely, its conception 
 of the worth of life, what things are desir- 
 able, and what are their conditions: The 
 Homeric Greek seldom reflected on life, but 
 lived with a sense peculiar to himself. He 
 could not comprehend his existence as in- 
 volving any moral aim, any tragical nodus 
 or complication. There was a retribution, a 
 nemesis, which followed the violation of an 
 ordered world, but it was external and a not 
 unavoidable evil if the trespasser had but 
 heroic might. EesponsibiHty for wrong-do- 
 ing was often laid at the door of Ate — blind, 
 deluding, ruinous Folly who abode among 
 men and glided with light feet over the heads 
 
MORAL IDEAS OF THE HOMERIC GREEKS 67 
 
 of mortals. Wrong-doing was infatuation of 
 
 mind — of the intellect and appealing to the 
 intellect. The doer of wrong was not respon- 
 sible for his deed, his mind had become dark- 
 ened, he w^as the victim of circumstances, or 
 of Ate, or other of the gods! Eight, order, 
 precedent, custom, dike, dlxrj-^ she who ap- 
 portions things to mortals and of whom men 
 expect justice, is strong beyond hybris, S/3/>:c, 
 wanton violence, brute strength, lawlessness, 
 disregard of the right^ of others, a companion 
 of surfeit. Cowardice and the want of nat- 
 ural affec;doh af e shameful, and that because 
 they have no force aSH* confuse th# order of j 
 ;life. ■ 
 
 To our view of those times, there is now 
 and then uttered a melancholy upon which 
 we moderns have turned glasses of analysis. 
 Such lines as Homer's "The gods spun the 
 thread of destiny for imhappy men to live 
 grieved at heart," and "There is nothing 
 more miserable than man of all that breathes 
 and creeps'upon the earth," sympathetically 
 crystallize a sentiment alive even in early 
 Hellenic faith. Such enunciations are, how- 
 ever, in the proportion of one to thousands 
 of adolescent delight. They are a natural 
 
68 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 reaction, the undertone, the low note show- 
 ing how the heroic Hellenes knew the pain 
 of mortal life, its bafiSing complexities, the 
 mystery of its discords and distress. 
 Homer sang the truth of his day, and sad- 
 ness the truth must know. The striations 
 only make the sunlight of joy that floods the 
 whole heroic time all the clearer. Youth 
 does not concern itself with sorrow, and mel- 
 ancholy in youth is morbidity. The heroic 
 Hellenes were youths. 
 
 Again that epic "envy of the gods" of 
 which the old poet sang, for instance when 
 Penelope after the return of Odysseus says, 
 "The gods gave us trouble, the gods jealous 
 that we should abide together and joy in our 
 youth and come to the threshold of old age;" 
 and the gods' deception of men by false ap- 
 pearances and by lies, are sentiments paral- 
 leled in the primitive beliefs of other races — 
 for instance in the race of Israel. The 
 ' ' envy ' ' contains within its fable endeavors of 
 youth to explain daemonic force shaping hu- 
 man life, the complexity of the moral law 
 which he feels and sees at work in the world 
 about him, and to find his limitations and 
 place within those laws — rudimentary fore- 
 
MORAL IDEAS OF THE HOMERIC GREEKS 69 
 
 runners of the endeavor phrased in our Old 
 Testament "walking humbly with God." 
 
 The world to the heroic Hellene was full 
 of wonders to employ the curiosity, and of 
 prizes to engage the ambition of all who had 
 the strength of mind to seek them. To be 
 rich and strong and bea_utiful and wise, a 
 friend of the gods, to have seen the wonders 
 of distant lands and the way^of foreign men, 
 were the aims of life. Bui this was all. 
 There was no suspicion or feeling of the un- 
 satisfactory character of these things. A 
 simple recognition of one's talents or power 
 was sufficient. Morbid self-love requiring the 
 refinements of flattery and advertisement was 
 to develop in a later day. There was no 
 desire for self-culture nor for the convic- 
 tion and consciousness of rectitude. It was 
 enough if one realized one 's aim in the world. 
 A man was considered a force, not a soul, a 
 beautiful, heroic energy accomplishing a pas- 
 sage through the world in bold and graceful 
 ways. A prosperous life, well-rounded and 
 crowned with years and honor, was a spectacle 
 not different from the sinking of the sun and 
 its majestic light to the western horizon. 
 The event of a young life checked in its heroic 
 
70 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 course liad deepest pathos because it meant 
 the defeat of strength and beauty. 
 
 Reverent fear, aides, aldd}<z, was the very 
 iiower of the moral consciousness of this age. 
 It is a feeling lost in Christian centuries, and 
 difficult to revive even sufficiently to compre- 
 hend its nature. "(1| was the instinct of prp- 
 portion, of self -limitation, which. . preserved 
 the Greek ^frorn all excess. Through it he 
 shrank from any unlimited utterance of him- 
 self, not only toward his fellow men but also 
 toward the divine who punish excess. This 
 one sentiment was his modesty — it kept him 
 to well-considered action and saved him from 
 self-assertion; his piety; his awe; his loyalty 
 — it saved him from desecration and boast- 
 ing; his filial and family feeling; his honor — 
 it moved him to reverence and sympathy for 
 the helpless and to estimating wrong to them 
 unpardonable. It was a shrinking self- 
 repression evading a violation of eternal jus- 
 tice, moral indignation at presumptuous deed, 
 the Hellene's recognition of the universal con- 
 science and awe for those eternal guardians 
 of the law of righteousness comprehended in 
 the goddesses sovereign of the very gods, the 
 omnipotent Moerse, Fates. Springing from 
 
EPIC POETRY THE AGE'S PECULIAR ART 71 
 
 the deptlis of Hellenic consciousness of life 
 and contemplation of life's order, aidos, rev- 
 erent fear, was to the epic Greek what faith 
 in the Eternal was to the Jew. It was the 
 core of the Greeks' religious feeling and as 
 a holy energy infused his life, his art. Aidos 
 is the antithesis of hyhris. 
 
 What the art of such an age must have 
 been is clear. It could not in large phases 
 manifest itself in plastic ideals because it 
 conceived life as significant only in its activ- 
 ity. Moving impression was everything, mi- 
 nute attention to the elements of things, noth- 
 ing. Painting therefore could not flourish. 
 Architecture subserves either the ostentation 
 of despotism, the ritual of mysticism, luxury 
 and opulence, or, as later in Greece, gives ex- 
 pression to a sense of the beautiful so culti- 
 vated by reflection that it delights in the har- 
 monies of geometrical forms. Music is the 
 child of meditation, the voice of the spirit con- 
 sidering within itself the wonders, the joys 
 and sorrows of life. Than music nothing 
 could be further from the genius of heroic 
 Greece. Lyric poetry is a later birth by 
 reason of its subjectivity. 
 
 Such an age as the heroic age of Greece, 
 
72 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 gifted with the race's mold of spirit, with 
 the race's feeling for art in the power of 
 words, and with a graceful, flexible speech 
 approaching perfection in its form, a lan- 
 guage of wonderful resource in shading its 
 meaning, — an age like this, conscious of the 
 gift of words yet centering on the doer of 
 deeds, must delight in the narrative of events, 
 sung in fluent and stately meter, clothed in all 
 the color of life. Epic poetry is the product 
 of this age; no other age has ever produced 
 the genuine epic song. Broad, bright, mov- 
 ing pictures finished to the last degree but 
 not encumbered by inanimate detail — such 
 are the rhapsodies of Homer. The shining 
 of spears and waving of plumes fill the Iliad 
 with life, and the keen, salt air of the sea 
 blows through the romantic pages of the 
 Odyssey. Nothing in nature was trivial or 
 mean in the eyes of the old poet. Everything 
 enjoys its ornamental epithet. 
 
 And the days they broadly lived, those typ- 
 ical men and women — their social and man- 
 nerly human life, their piety, their natural 
 dignity, their restraint, their courage and 
 bravery, their warfare, their travel and their 
 open politics, their dwellings, the magic tri- 
 
EPIC POETRY THE AGE'S PECULIAR ART 73 
 
 pods hammered by a god's hands, their 
 youth's delight in exquisite work of woven 
 peplum and in precious material, their shin- 
 ing, high-wrought armor — frankly stand be- 
 fore us to-day and tell the measure of their 
 adolescent joys. ' ' Ewig jung allein ist Phan- 
 tasie." Their imagination seized beauty in 
 tectonic crafts inherited from the old ^gean 
 days, and feasted as that of a child. 
 
 The epos was the reality of the spirit of 
 the time. In Homer's poems the Hellenic 
 race was itself reflected and became conscious 
 of its ideals. In Homer the Hellenes first 
 came to know themselves. The poet took 
 their early race conceptions, their beliefs and 
 traditions, their modes of looking at life, and 
 made them the fountain and stream of his 
 song. He summarized the race's past — the 
 Iliad is the tale of the battle of the Achseans 
 fighting their way to adventurous wealth. 
 
 But that which he created reacted power- 
 fully upon the national mind. The human 
 life the verses mirrored led the Hellenes to 
 train their youth upon its conduct, upon its 
 embodied keywords for life conduct. The 
 Iliad's pan-Hellenism taught race-conscious- 
 ness ; for instance, when Greeks advanced to 
 
74 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 battle "longing in their soul to support one 
 another," "so the clan shall succor clan, and 
 tribe, tribe." It held a moral as well as a 
 literary education. Through centuries com- 
 ing later, and far iato the imperial times of 
 Eome, Homer's poems stood as a Bible — that 
 is, the songs were to the Greeks as the Bible 
 and its word of God-in-the-world have been to 
 the modern Christian community. It compre- 
 hended as well an encyclopaedia of science and 
 arts and genealogy. Homer's Iliad denoted 
 their race and fatherland in youngest man- 
 hood. 
 
 The blind poet, to repeat, invented no 
 story. He took race sagas, time-honored 
 tales of Troy, and lays embodying traditions 
 of the old civilization, and wrought them into 
 rhapsodies, casting them in perfect form and 
 stamping them with the process of a great 
 creative mind. He sang to such assemblies 
 as filled the houses of chief, king and lord, to 
 their wives, daughters and retainers. Per- 
 haps also he sang to frequenters of popular 
 festivals whither throngs had journeyed to 
 honor some god of the race. And long after 
 his day, at great festivals of Athens, relays 
 of bards chanted the Iliad and Odyssey. 
 
EPIC POETRY THE AGE'S PECULIAR ART 75 
 
 He sang of the eternal powers, of human 
 deeds and men's and women's lives. His in- 
 troduction of their earth's places, sea-coasts 
 and currents, and land and sea winds, must 
 needs fit themselves to fact and be true not 
 only to the event he would narrate, but also 
 to his hearers' taste and life and knowledge. 
 He sang to bring his listeners the delight of 
 larger vision of men and of the world, and 
 the delight also of a perfect art. He sang 
 with the warmth and intensity of a mighty 
 seer. To this day the ear of man has never 
 become weary of listening to his silver tones. 
 Nor has the mind of man lost amaze at his 
 poetic fire and splendid diction. He was the 
 first Hellene who, it has been said, voiced his 
 race's courage and unconquerable will to pen- 
 etrate life and set it forth as an intelligent 
 order. He is, at least, the first of whom wei 
 know. 
 
 Joy is the keynote of Homer, joy in a bril- 
 liant, beautiful world. His people, especially 
 his men, idealized self-reliant beings, choose a 
 brief and active life in the world to droning, 
 unlaborious days in the quietude of home. 
 Here on this earth is man's theater of action. 
 After this the unseen world, Hades, and it 
 
76 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 were better, the wraitli of Achilles declared 
 from the midst of the shades, here on earth to 
 serve some man of mean estate than to dwell 
 with all who have gone down to death. 
 
 Homer exalted nobles and kings and their 
 business, war. The people, toilers and up- 
 builders who supported the destroyers and 
 idlers, could labor and hsten and yield to the 
 overlord's decision. But it is, in fairness, 
 worth noting in the measure we have taken 
 of these epic Hellenes, and of their innate 
 humanity, that nowhere in the Iliad and 
 Odyssey are such pictures of narrowness, 
 hardness and inhumanity as are painted in 
 the Hebrew epos of patriarchal life and the 
 Law — and in times supposed to synchronize 
 with the times the Greek poems portray. 
 
 Mutations in those old centuries we can 
 with no sureness visualize. Between the old 
 civilization of Homer's song and the new 
 about to be bom was a shifting of races — 
 of that at least we may be certain. Experi- 
 ences must have been manifold and prolonged, 
 the pain of the world-spirit caustic, to change 
 the social consciousness of the Hellenes from 
 the life portrayed by this earliest epic of 
 theirs we know. 
 
ANOTHER EPIC SINGER 77 
 
 After the close of the age of Homer's story, 
 uniting that age with the age to come, another 
 epic singer and an ^olian Greek, belong- 
 ing perhaps to another prehistoric minstrel 
 school, tuned his lyre to a wholly different 
 key. He himself and his hearers, all with the 
 staid, sad heart of earth-workers, had lost 
 heroic enthusiasms. Some great impelling 
 force, a force we find in the democracy of the 
 coming age, was beginning to make its way 
 and direct the thoughts of men. 
 
 Hesiod told of the inherent dignity of labor 
 — of planting, sowing, reaping, of winter 
 storms and the bearing on corn-planting of 
 the spring rainfall, of the cry of crane and 
 sparrow, of the cutting of vines, of the leafing 
 of trees, the threshing of corn, of the vintage, 
 of thrift and diligence — an early Greek 
 Thomas Tusser in his plain, shrewd, cautious, 
 homely saws, not forgetting the crusty fling at 
 women such natures commonly nurture, a 
 "Poor Eichard" it has been said, a singer 
 who learned by his own experience in a law- 
 suit to declare how much more the half is 
 than the whole, and how blessed a man might 
 be upon a diet of mallows and leeks — "That 
 man is best who is most laborious"; who has 
 
78 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 judgment about the birds (tbeir song, their 
 coming and going habits explaining increase 
 and decline of the seasons), and who shuns 
 overstepping of the (moral) laws; "In front 
 of virtue the gods set work and the sweat of 
 the forehead." Practice virtue, not neces- 
 sarily for virtue itself but for the sake of the 
 results of the practice. In this teaching the 
 poet's evolution is similar to that of Leviticus 
 and Deuteronomy, and rises at times to the 
 standard of the Proverbs and the Wisdom of 
 Solomon. 
 
 Hesiod was a true child of his tribe which 
 obtained the sovereignty of Boeotia after that 
 subversion we call the Trojan war — a vigor- 
 ous, hardy people whose minds rarely soared 
 beyond the body's needs, a people, neverthe- 
 less, who brought from northern Pieria to 
 Mount Helicon the ancient worship of the 
 Muses and centuries later produced Corinna 
 and Pindar. Instead of Homer 's abandon to 
 the shining, shifting, broad epic world dis- 
 solving and disappearing about him, Hesiod 
 struggles with reality, with the set bounds of 
 the small farmer in the iron age in which he 
 lives, when wrong is rampant and the great 
 devour bribes and give crooked judgment. 
 
ANOTHER EPIC SINGER 79 
 
 The golden age and the gentle bronze age for 
 mortals have passed. In Elysian Fields and 
 Islands of the Blessed may be some relief for 
 the ills of earth. 
 
 Not a brilliant, imaginative, objective, but a 
 subjective world, the thoughts of himself, this 
 BcEotian shepherd chiefly sings. Nowhere is 
 poetry his sole aim. Didactics, practical 
 wisdom embedding proverbs of possibly ear- 
 lier singers on every-day affairs of life, 
 ethical precepts, and teachings about the gods 
 are his work. The Olympians of Hesiod are 
 further away from human habitations than 
 in Homer 's song. ' ' No prophet among men, ' ' 
 he sang, "shall know the mind of segis-bear- 
 ing Zeus, ' ' son of Time. His Theogony tell- 
 ing of the genesis of the world and the origin 
 of the gods embodies passages of elevation 
 and dignity. ' ' First of all was Chaos : then 
 came the broad-bosomed Earth, the stable 
 resting place of all things ; and gloomy Tar- 
 tarus in the depths of the Earth; and Eros, 
 fairest of the immortals." 
 
 The poems foreshadow ideas of the new, 
 opening age, and it seems impossible that 
 Hesiod was ignorant of the coming cult of 
 Orphism. But in the Theogony he so sang 
 
80 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 the old legends of the gods that the poem 
 came in later Greece to be esteemed a code 
 of the race's early religious conceptions. It 
 formed a dogma — ^but under Greek conditions 
 was without the seclusion and exclusive in- 
 terpretation of priests. 
 
BURGEONING DEMOCRACY; ITS 
 PURITANISM: ITS ART 
 
In Greece the universality of human life and thought, 
 of human civilization, let me say the true idea of man, 
 first came into appearance; the full development of 
 individualism, and with it the true freedom of man, 
 in all the relations which we comprise under this 
 word, morally, politically, intellectually, artistically, were 
 created spontaneously at first in Greece and only in 
 Greece. — Eduaed Meyer, in The Development of Indi- 
 viduality in Ancient Eistory. 
 
 (geeece speaks) 
 
 Earth ... 
 I am she that made thee lovely with, my beauty 
 
 From north to south : 
 Mine, the fairest lips, took first the fire of duty 
 
 From thine own mouth. 
 Mine, the fairest eyes, sought first thy laws, and knew 
 them 
 Truths undefiled; 
 Mine, the fairest hands, took freedom first into them, 
 A weanling child. 
 — Swinburne, in The Litany of Nations. 
 
 To the Ancients however the aim of the agonistic edu- 
 cation was the welfare of the whole, of the civic society. 
 Every Athenian for instance was to cultivate his Ego 
 in contest, so far that it should be of the highest service 
 to Athens. . . . The youth thought of the welfare of 
 his native town when he vied vsdth others in running, 
 throwing or singing; it was her glory that he wanted to 
 increase with his own. . . . Every Greek from childhood 
 felt within himself the burning wish to be ... an in- 
 strument for the welfare of his own town. — Friedrich 
 Nietzsche, in Homer's Contest. 
 
 82 
 
BURGEONING DEMOCRACY; ITS 
 PURITANISM; ITS ART 
 
 PASSING OF THE MONARCHY: CONSTRUCTIVE 
 INDIVIDUALISM 
 
 The beautiful youth of Hellas, the Greek 
 heroic age, faded in the gloom of an indefin- 
 able period of which we know nothing, not 
 even its durance — in immense political con- 
 vulsions which accompanied the emergence 
 upon the forescene of the great Greek division 
 that the Hellenes called Dorian. That other 
 general division, the versatile, imaginative, 
 fluid, seafaring lonians — Javan of "the Isles 
 afar off" says the Hebrew Isaiah writing 
 about the beginning of this new age of Greece 
 — that lively, impassioned, sunlit folk suscep- 
 tible of most delicate impressions, isolated, 
 disunited and broken with feuds, the .^gean 
 lonians had their complementary character in 
 Dorians so-called, perhaps the most persist- 
 ently warlike of all the hardy northern in- 
 comers, who, in the darkness of the indefin- 
 
 83 
 
84 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 able centuries, sallied from their liiglilands 
 and made themselves masters^ — ^masters who 
 reverenced a severe spirit, who had the strik- 
 ing constancy of character and solemnity of 
 thought of country dwellers, who scorned the 
 effeminacies of art and the democratization of 
 trade, who subjected all that came within their 
 reach to their notions of right and of civil 
 government, who knew but two passions — war 
 and a religion identified with pride of and 
 loyalty to race. 
 
 The Dorians roused in Grreece a spirit far 
 more rugged, less extended but far deeper 
 than that which mirrored Homer's picture- 
 loving song. With them a re-formation of 
 spiritual poise established itself. Grreek Pur- 
 itans were invigorating the national spirit. 
 The age of the emancipation of the individual 
 is now coming on. Much of the old mediation 
 of the king, that primitive consciousness that 
 found group-feeling and group-thinking nec- 
 essary, is now passing away. Each man 
 would enter into direct relations with the 
 world. The lord of men, the old royalty, is 
 in some cities overthrown. Even the very 
 limited power of the king came to seem to 
 the people, now fully Hellenic, an immoral 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OP CITIES 85 
 
 form of government inasmuch as it failed in 
 moderation, self -limitation, forced itself upon 
 separate, individual beings, opened the way 
 for visitation of retribution — from power and 
 wealth spring satiety, from satiety foolishn 
 ness, offense, crime. 
 
 The politics of the time undergo a striking 
 evolution, varying in form and even in method 
 of development. Cities are springing for- 
 ward and their growth marks the individu- 
 ality of men. It is worth noting here that 
 in the little land of Palestine during the 
 eighth and seventh centuries before Christ, as 
 Amos and Hosea and Isaiah make clear, a 
 struggle went on for the recognition of the 
 conscience of a single individual. 
 
 In many G-reek city-states, as time passes 
 oligarchs establish themselves. They super- 
 sede the king and absorb his function of ad- 
 ministration to themselves. They are chiefs 
 who served as councilors to the dispossessed 
 king, or nobles claiming descent from the 
 mighty men of old, the interpretation of the 
 law and the exercise of some religious rite. 
 They embody the first pohtical expression of 
 the new order in its change from the old. 
 The people are free, but still without active 
 
86 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 political rights. Their evolving conscious- 
 ness of separateness or individualism the 
 aristocracies doubtless appeased by occasion- 
 ally calling together their general assembly. 
 But the assumption of the oligarchs bore 
 home to farmer and artisan, and to the new 
 order created by development of commerce, 
 the lesson that the functions of administering 
 government were not sole prerogatives of a 
 heaven-descended king, but rather a power 
 that could be granted by law and directed to 
 certain ends. 
 
 The state had become a more complicated 
 thing than in Homeric song. Sense of apart- 
 ness, rudimentary individualism, growing ca- 
 pacity for self-control or law-abidingness, was 
 able to reason that if nobles could supersede 
 the king of the heroic age, should not also the 
 assembly of citizens in which rested the ulti- 
 mate source of authority of the state 1 Here 
 was not only the democratic idea in strong 
 force, but feeling of membership of the state, 
 fellowship in a common government and 
 the duties it involves — the state is a rational 
 order which men must have for a tolerable 
 and complete life. 
 
 Constructive, progressive, promotive, gifted 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 87 
 
 with imagination and reason, the mind and 
 will of the Hellene worked out in some such 
 development its consciousness of political 
 right. In its process the struggle between 
 nobles, rich in inherited prerogatives and 
 material belongings, and the emerging peo- 
 ples was fairly before the world. 
 
 During this progress, however, there in- 
 tervened the setting up and brilliant rule 
 of those liberals known as tyrants or des- 
 pots — ^men who posed as defenders of simpler 
 men against the rapacity of the oligarchs. 
 There was now in the growing towns a sturdy 
 commons, and, in the country, farmers of 
 free mind who had faith in inborn rights. 
 In various ways, by force of seizing the 
 city's acropolis through hired troops, by wile 
 of proclaiming himself champion of the people 
 in injustices they had suffered at the hands 
 of exploiters, the new overlord, oftenest from 
 the oligarchs whom he endeavored to dis- 
 possess, held his absolute power and asserted 
 the civic unity of the elements of the state. 
 He tranquillized factional feelings by meet- 
 ing their divisions. Commonly his govern- 
 ment was an excess of paternalism; his court 
 a center of all his time 's splendor in art and 
 
88 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 literature; Ms benefactions and public gifts 
 most lavish and magnificent. The Peisistra- 
 tidsB, for example, tyrants in Athens even 
 after Solon's time, set up the flowing recital, 
 by minstrel at the pan-Athenaic festival, of 
 the Iliad and Odyssey in their completeness. 
 In architecture they began to the honor of 
 Zeus Olympius a temple whose fragments, 
 though belonging to a much later century, 
 beautify Athens to-day. 
 
 Only extreme conditions of the old feudal- 
 ism during under ideas evolved by new orders 
 coming to the fore, by fresh blood and a new 
 point of view of hfe spreading through Greek 
 lands, permitted the tyrants' hold during the 
 generations they continued. Mouthing inter- 
 est in the people, yet seeking to gain the 
 strength of the executive power which the 
 oligarchs by their robberies had weakened, 
 the tyrants eased civil strife, kept Greek 
 social foundations from severest shock and 
 bridged the break between the old ideas and 
 oncoming democracy. Now as at all times 
 the people formed history — the body of the 
 people ever ready for self-sacrifice, to give 
 life and property to their country. A few 
 with the instinct, or avarice, or corruption, 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 89 
 
 of leaders suggested and endeavored to guide. 
 At times the Greek despot proved what Ms 
 name signified in centuries then to come. 
 
 ' ' All Hellas in early times, ' ' says Thucyd- 
 ides, "was in a state of migration." The 
 lonians were especially mobile; inroads of 
 peoples from the north may have kept them 
 unstable. In the great human flux of these 
 centuries many Ionic Greeks settled the coast 
 of Asia Minor and developed rich cities which 
 later focused civilizations far surpassing in 
 luxury the motherland's. They also evolved 
 a great citizen class which enjoyed unheard- 
 of felicity; "The middle classes are best off 
 in many ways," said Phocylides, a gnomic 
 poet of Miletus. 
 
 Hellas was not in exactness a geographical 
 expanse. It bespoke spiritual possessions. 
 It had meant in religious worship certain 
 traditions and rites projected by race con- 
 sciousness, in art an excellence, in character 
 a moderation and independence. It was com- 
 ing to mean in political life a constitution. 
 
 In these centuries of political inorganity 
 discontent ruled everywhere. Old homes be- 
 came narrow. As the leaves of the forest, 
 so are the generations of men, sings Homer; 
 
90 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 leaves that be, the winds scatter upon the 
 ground, but blooming woods, when spring- 
 time comes, put forth other anew. Greek 
 peoples had waxed. Legends of fair, favored 
 lands beyond the seas tickled willing ears and 
 ardent imaginations. Those more curious in- 
 tellectually, and more adventurous and phys- 
 ically energetic, stirred for broader spaces. 
 Greece swarmed with colonies that carried 
 her children and her burgeoning heritage 
 over the Mediterranean, dotting the shores 
 of the Euxine, to the neighborhood of that 
 now called Crimea, and the Propontis as well 
 as -lEIgean, with settlements. They fared 
 along the sea's water ways founding CumEe, 
 Tarentum, Sybaris and Croton, Cyrene, Mar- 
 seilles, and entered upon the luxuriant fertil- 
 ity of Sicily, then as now a home of nature's 
 lethal forces which sometimes wake and turn 
 and shudder — forces which the immigrants 
 to Gela and Syracuse and other Hellenic 
 towns, with penetrating imagination person- 
 ified as a discomfited giant, "cliffs press 
 down his hairy breast and a pillar of heaven 
 holds him fast, even hoary ^tna, nurse of 
 sharp snows through all the year." Wher- 
 ever they settled they bore in, in sign of 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 91 
 
 spiritual unity, sacred fire from the hearth 
 of their mother city, and the worship of 
 Apollo, keeper of the civic life of their old 
 home and kindler of illuminating thought in 
 the darkness of neighboring barbarians. 
 
 The colonists' life of essaying the mighty 
 task of home and settlement building gave 
 those Greeks of ancient days, as it has in these 
 late centuries of ours given modern colonists, 
 a buoyancy, an openness and receptivity of 
 mind, a susceptibility to the influence of new 
 ideas, and a readiness for opportunity and 
 zeal in experimentation, which led the people 
 often to outstrip those they had left behind. 
 The first elegiac and lyric poets of whom we 
 know were in the eastern settlements. Phi- 
 losophy found an early home at Miletus and 
 among the Hellenes of Italy and Sicily. The 
 first excellent dramatists were western Sicil- 
 ians. 
 
 Between these daughter colonies and their 
 mother cities Hellenes journeyed continually, 
 thus adding to the keen wit of their nativity 
 the eye-opener of travel. Because of a com- 
 mon alliance of blood, or for civic needs, they 
 visited the oracle of Apollo at Delphi or other 
 religious uses, they fared to the national 
 
92 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 games, their festivals in poetry, music and 
 disciplined skill of body. Their travel by 
 water way meant the need of larger and more 
 seaworthy boats. Thus colonization stimu- 
 lated mechanics of boat-building. And with 
 navigation must go better knowledge of as- 
 tronomy and mathematics. Allied arts and 
 crafts advanced. Stamped coins as stand- 
 ards of value came to displace old estimates, 
 such as the Homeric measure by armor. 
 
 Through this progress of commerce de- 
 mocracy gained much. Language also, that 
 marvelous speech of theirs, was developing 
 its fitness for public discussion of interests 
 of state. Speakers felt the need of argument, 
 and in effort to explain and persuade, power 
 of expression was growing among the people. 
 The ethical and philosophic thinker, the gno- 
 mic speaker, at this time also increased the 
 language by whittling out those life-conduct 
 maxims with which the Hellene was so splen- 
 didly equipped. 
 
 But on nearly every side, in the west in 
 Sicily, as in Agrigentum, in cities of the Asia 
 Minor coast, in Miletus, among the Ionian 
 islands, as Samos, was the despot, the benevo- 
 lent organizer, the force all social elements 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 93 
 
 recognized or submitted to in gaining a new 
 recasting, in bringing social order to inde- 
 pendence. Not in Sparta, however, the com- 
 pletest political embodiment of the Dorian 
 character. In the compact aristocracy of that 
 city-camp, the accredited founder of which 
 was the legislator Lycurgus, two kings 
 reigned together in not distinctly lined func- 
 tions. There the government was an oli- 
 garchy in which the power of the ephors was 
 little modified by the council of elders and the 
 agora of citizens. All free men were sol- 
 diers. Spartan law forbade the Spartan 
 proper learning a mechanical trade or ar- 
 tistry. The productive class and the crafts- 
 men, those laboring and supplying necessi- 
 ties, a race of serfs, had no political rights. 
 
 In the Athens of these days the king dis- 
 appeared by the shearing of the priest part 
 of his office of basileus, and naming him 
 archon for life. To name him chief archon 
 for ten years and then divide his power 
 among nine archons appointed each year 
 marked other steps in evolution. The legis- 
 lation of the serene and humane spirit of 
 Solon (594^3 B. C.) went still further. In its 
 relief, for instance, to small farmers liable, 
 
94 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 in the economic distress of the time, to en- 
 slavement for the debt of mortgages, and in 
 endeavor to set order between established 
 classes, "I gave," he said, "as much strength 
 as is enough, without taking away from their 
 honor, or adding to it. To those who had 
 power and the splendor of riches I gave 
 counsel that they should not uphold violence. 
 I stood with my strong shield spread over 
 both and suffered neither to prevail by 
 wrong." But Solon, governor of Athens, 
 found his generous ardor incommunicable. 
 
 We know already that to the Greeks cast- 
 ing away the old and endeavoring to evolve 
 a new sense of the state, two principles of 
 government, a loose and close-knit, were at 
 hand. Among the fluent peoples to the north 
 they saw a tribal life where conflict was per- 
 ennial and power lay with one man only so 
 long as he had force to hold the headship. 
 To the east there lay the sluggish, military 
 leviathan whose head was a weak, lust- 
 ful czar, whose body, millions of subjects, 
 heterogeneous, possessed of no spirit of in- 
 dividuality nor of organization, still in the 
 bounds of the primitive group, cohering 
 through fear and slavish acquiescence. In 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 95 
 
 neither political form could the Hellenes see 
 the service of freedom for which they were 
 outreaching, and reason they sought as a foot- 
 hold. Neither offered to their aspiring polit- 
 ical genius a union of independent wills for 
 which the law they were learning to make, 
 and agree to, was master. Knowledge of 
 oriental absolutism, and tribal anarchy, 
 strengthened their love of a free state and 
 quickened their race consciousness. 
 
 Hatred of the Greeks at these times for 
 kings and the difficult rule of the oligarchs, 
 was doubtless often founded upon reflection 
 induced by economic distresses, and the de- 
 generation of the aristocrat to a plutocrat. 
 Their states were small and the people came 
 into close contact with their princelings. 
 Upon their early notion of just balance, of 
 equity, and their growing sense of ordered 
 justice, a prevalence of law, a political prin- 
 ciple doubtless strengthened by Dorian in- 
 fluences — that every individual of the state, 
 without any exception whatever, should bring 
 his individual desires and passions within 
 the control and regulation of the rule agreed 
 to in the state — they founded their conunon- 
 wealths. Most of all should those do this in 
 
96 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 "whom power was vested. ' ' A well-constituted 
 state is made," said Solon, "when the people 
 obey the rulers, and the rulers obey the 
 laws," "when good laws and good govern- 
 ment set the state in order, subdue insolence, 
 chain the hands of evil doers, set straight the 
 crooked ways of perverted law," even when 
 "citizens seek to overthrow the state by love 
 of money and by running after self-seeking 
 demagogues." The shifty uncertainty and 
 restlessness of his times deeply impressed 
 Solon and may have led to his panegyric ex- 
 pression for stability. 
 
 In law men set a rule, they endeavor to 
 conserve the eternal, the unchangeable, what 
 they deem best. Law is "reason without 
 passion. ' ' Law, ' ' born in heaven, ' ' should be 
 the expression of the judgment of the people. 
 ' ' The people ought to fight in defence of the 
 law as they do of their city walls, ' ' said Her- 
 aelitus. "Lawless disregard of the rights of 
 others, they should be more careful to quench 
 than a conflagration." "Law is to them ar- 
 bitrary master," said Demaratus of his fel- 
 low Spartans. And the old-time law of sacri- 
 fice begetting love worked here. For that to 
 which they had given their energy awoke in 
 
CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 97 
 
 the Greeks a new devotion. Loyalty to their 
 city became and remained a passion. Their 
 state was their larger, nobler, enduring, self- 
 less selves. Duties to the state were to these 
 Greeks paramount to all else. 
 
 Thus the Greek cities, in their upbuilding 
 and through generations of turbulence, 
 learned to apply reason to politics. Many 
 cities in various ways essayed forms of their 
 idea of liberty — a state balanced, in harmony 
 with the people it governed, the work of their 
 spirit, embodying their character and indi- 
 viduality. The end of the state was to them, 
 as Aristotle said in a later time, "a good 
 life," the life that brings out the best in the 
 individual, that guides and teaches the spirit 
 of man, a city whose form and government 
 connects itself with the best works. So the 
 city-state becomes the individual's end; in 
 that he realizes himself. The Hellene be- 
 lieved himself to have gained independence 
 when he gained the independence of his state. 
 
 The Hellene's city-state aimed at an ideal 
 society. It connoted a perfect organization, 
 all its parts intertwined and uniting in en- 
 deavor to form a flawless whole. Side by 
 side with this age 's individualism, as in other 
 
98 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 epochs marked by healthy individualistic 
 spirit, went the ideal of devotion that prompts 
 the individual to bring his own peculiar gifts 
 to the welfare of the whole and to suffer a 
 snuffing out of the individual factor — that is, 
 the individualism developing among the 
 Greeks of this day must combine with others 
 similar to its own in order to gain its end. 
 The best individual was the best citizen. 
 
 ORPHISM: ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES: RECRUDES- 
 CENCE OF SUPERSTITION 
 
 But the greatest mark of this second dis- 
 tinctive phase of the Greek spirit is not its 
 nascent democracy — except as its nascent 
 democracy is a result of the reflection with 
 which the Hellenes with their ever-present 
 religious consciousness, begin to consider life 
 and the world and their problems.^ The hu- 
 man spirit turns from scenes shining with 
 gods and heroes to consider itself. In this 
 action it unites with its attitude in the social 
 crisis and is part of the whole movement of 
 
 ^ "The first of human concerns is religion" — a sentence 
 which the English Lord Acton wrote — ^voices the feeling 
 of the Hellenes. 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 99 
 
 the era. A free state is parent of a free de- 
 velopment of the rehgious consciousness of 
 man. The rise of cities broke up the old di- 
 visions of tribes and created others anew, re- 
 cast new loyalties. The old gods no longer 
 satisfy, nor the old maxims and ideals of man- 
 hood. Life must have a more profound, more 
 self-satisfying aim. 
 
 Onward from the eighth century before 
 Christ, we have seen, men's thoughts moved 
 from the heroic glory that colored the age 
 foredone to will, thought, feeling that the hu- 
 man being was of consideration. In the 
 struggle at hand the individual was now {he 
 factor of weight. In politics he was forc- 
 ing new forms. He sought explanation for 
 his awakened longings. Time was ripe for 
 a new religion. With exacting democracy, a 
 practical sense of democracy's value in af- 
 fairs of life, has always gone a distinguished 
 other-worldliness, a puritanism — the intense 
 practicality of democracy, its emphatic appeal 
 to the individual thought and emotion, seems 
 to be at one with the individualism of puri- 
 tanism and its aU-controUing homesickness 
 for heaven. 
 
 The north from time immemorial has been 
 
100 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 the home of spiritual impulses. -iS]gean 
 peoples of the pre-Greek age had been ' ' earth- 
 born," and their Mother Earth, Earth the 
 Life-giver, <pi)aic,oo(; ala, barely spiritualized. 
 The first Greek, he of the heroic centuries, had 
 laid stress upon the importance, the dominion, 
 the divinity of the body. To him the soul was 
 a vapor akin to a strengthless underworld, a 
 pitiful phantasm. In the age now beginning 
 a new religion, Orphism, emphasized the very 
 antithesis of this — that the soul must be of 
 celestial essence, and the body no more than 
 a dungeon in which the heavenly being was 
 chained. Northern folk shut off from the al- 
 luring joy in nature's face of the south, and 
 in their colder, more somber climate, devel- 
 oped introspection. 
 
 Worship of Dionysus came directly from 
 Thracians, perhaps indirectly from cognate 
 peoples in Phrygia. It may have been a re- 
 surgence of old, pre-Greek religious faiths. 
 Doubtless it was allied to seasonal and fer- 
 tility rites of the religion of the -ZEgeans. 
 Among certain communities of Hellas the god, 
 with his band of attendant satyrs and women 
 devotees, invaded the hold of the definite 
 divinities of Homer's song — divinities them- 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 101 
 
 selves we tave seen often originating in and 
 evolved out of physical elements and physical 
 impulses of tlie world. That also was Diony- 
 sus, the mighty spirit-workman of the sap and 
 of the warming soil, a son of Earth Mother, 
 of the Mother of Corn, in his northern home 
 the grantor of fertility, the god who quick- 
 ened vegetation of tree and thicket. Also 
 god, perhaps, of a cereal intoxicant ; at last at 
 home and in Greece becoming the god of 
 grapes and wine. 
 
 To the religious, humanizing mind of the 
 Hellene, who felt with primal vividness the 
 charm of the mysterious workings of nature 
 and revered the products of that magic, all 
 grain and nourishing fruits were possessed of 
 a god. The feeling is still in our hearts when 
 we stand in amaze before the demiurgic force 
 of spring; when we watch the growths of a 
 com field, turn from picking a wind-flower, or 
 mourn in the fall of an elm the passing of a 
 fellow. 
 
 The spirit of fertility, Dionysus, is spoken 
 of in Homer. But the poet treats him mea- 
 gerly, possibly because the god had lately 
 made his way and then held no recognition as 
 a master. Whether his cult was borne to the 
 
102 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Greeks by Thracian or Hellene convert and 
 standard-bearer, or whether some human 
 wave leaping southward carried the god's ti- 
 dings, is lost in the long silence between first 
 Greek records and that far-away day. With 
 Dionysus went also Eros, Love, the world- 
 building, primal hfe,^ the Ancient One who 
 set the stars a-dancing. Eros gave the mys- 
 tic teachings. Both were gods of the fertili- 
 
 ^ In Love's name, wrote the Greek Sophocles, are hid- 
 den many names, force, desire, energy, and tranquillity. 
 
 No modern has better expressed the Greek conception 
 of Eros in his influence upon human kind than Cole- 
 ridge in this verse : 
 
 "AU thoughts, all passions, aU delights, 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
 All are but ministers of Love, 
 And feed his sacred flame." 
 
 Robert Bridges, poet laureate of England, has put an 
 essentially Hellenic thought in the first five of the fol- 
 lowing lines : 
 
 "Love, from whom the world begun 
 Hath the secret of the sun. 
 
 Love can tell, and love alone, 
 Whence the million stars were strewn, 
 Why each atom knows its own, 
 How, in spite of woe and death, 
 Gay is life and sweet is breath." 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 103 
 
 zation of the earth and of life. In this way, 
 again, the Hellenes' consciousness of an all- 
 controlling spirit, and their instinct for seek- 
 ing its visibility, manifested itself. 
 
 Amid its northlands faith in soul-wander- 
 ings was clearly united with the Dionysus re- 
 ligion. That in man a god lived who would 
 be free when he could break the chains of the 
 body, was deeply grounded in the Dionysus 
 cult and its purificatory ecstasies and rituals. 
 In the amplitude of the night — and in the 
 night perhaps because Dionysus was of the 
 earth, a chthonian god, and dwelt in the dark, 
 or again perhaps because of the faith, com- 
 mon even among later Greeks, of a secret and 
 mysterious fullness of life amid the powers of 
 the earth at night — in the amplitude of the 
 night, clad in skins, decked with the wanton 
 ivy and that other vine, the grape, mother of 
 strange power, their hair bound with some 
 fertility charm or emblem, a lissome snake or 
 a plant, waving torches to purge the air of 
 evil, in unconstrained nearness to nature, joy- 
 ing in union with the universal life, the ritual- 
 ists of the religion carried on their mysteries 
 and reveled through wildwood, vale of thicket 
 and over mountain, far from restraint of the 
 
104 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 abode of men. Their great nature god liad 
 put an unaccountable magic in the vine and 
 its clusters, some holy animate thing. Di- 
 onysus, the way of life, was through this 
 magic in wine. Wine itself was divine. 
 The very god vitalized the fermented drink, 
 and he most fully seized those who drank 
 deepest. Also in the kid of their sacrifice the 
 devotees partook of communion. Crying 
 "Evoe!" they ate the flesh raw for the sake 
 of vital power; to absorb the sacred blood 
 while it was warm was to absorb life. 
 
 Flutes shrilled and increased their emotion. 
 In the dance sacred to the root-being, world- 
 builder, Eros, their Bacchic ecstasy was com- 
 pleted. The god incarnated the emotion of 
 the dance, the personification. Their frenzy 
 was believed to evoke the fructifying powers 
 of the earth, and, in the hushed exhaustion 
 that follows over-exaltation, the spirit to have 
 its profoundest communion with and absorp- 
 tion in the infinite. The goal of the rite was 
 the god's dwelling within the devout and for 
 the time granting his character and power. 
 
 The communion may have been a survival of 
 early totemic rites in which devotees sought 
 to gain the life-force of a slain beast by 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 105 
 
 assimilating his flesh and by getting inside 
 the skin of the sacrifice. In their eating of 
 his flesh they felt that they fortified and sanc- 
 tified themselves — through assimilation of the 
 divine substance. In those days rituals of 
 human sacrifice were reported in Thrace — 
 and also among contemporary Hebrews and 
 other tribes. 
 
 This new cult, it has been noted, made one 
 appeal to the Greeks which in all centuries 
 beckons every child of the human race — the 
 call to ecstatic submergence in the pulsing 
 wild of the world, a return to primitive ideas 
 and simple ancestral ways of many thousands 
 of years before, a hurling aside of conventions 
 stultifying or nullifying the true being. If 
 they had this conception in their rites, the 
 Hellenes would, in short, return for the time 
 to stimulating kinship with the fawn and fox 
 and other beasts whose skins they wore when 
 they worshiped. In the centuries this re- 
 ligion took on the strong anthropomorphism 
 of the Greek spirit, the Hellenes were develop- 
 ing their town life. 
 
 The enthusiasm of Dionysus may have been 
 a phase of that spiritual experience called, in 
 the phrase of certain psychologists, "autom- 
 
106 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 atism," or "uprushing of the subliminal 
 consciousness" of each individual spirit — 
 that is, it may have been psychically akin to 
 the supernormal mood called "conversion." 
 The cult emphasized the precept that only 
 through a soul's experience of spiritual 
 ecstasy, an inner catastrophe, a second birth, 
 could the human pass to the divine, and it 
 used hypnotizing methods for bringing on the 
 trance. 
 
 In the old Greek cult faith in the enthusiasm 
 was widespread. It seized upon the energies 
 of its converts, and as a whole exalted them, 
 even if the common sanity and every-day 
 measure of the moral code stood aside for the 
 time and the excesses of the enthusiasm were 
 subject to interpretation by symbol alone. 
 
 Freeing the god by breaking the chains of 
 the body identified the early night feasts of 
 the north, and even, especially at first, in 
 some parts of Greece. But when Orphic mys- 
 tics took over and adapted the faith to the 
 life of towns struggling with the evolving and 
 practical democracy of Hellas, nocturnal 
 wanderings and excesses of devotees could be 
 followed only in symbolic copy. The Diony- 
 sus worship was in Hellas subject to the Hel- 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 107 
 
 lene's rationalizing and stood for the most 
 part for consistent and energetic morality. 
 Still, while sobered by the Greek spirit a 
 fervor, an inebriety of mind, persisted in 
 hymns and other celebrations of the god, and 
 differentiated his ritual from that of the older 
 gods. Not only in their choral dithyramb, 
 or spring song and the imitative dance, but 
 even later in their sculpture and painting the 
 Greeks showed this enthusiasm. 
 
 The antipathy of an ancient, racial, ordered 
 sobriety, we say, met the whirling reel of the 
 Dionysus worship. For generations the 
 Greeks' instinct had maintained a deep- 
 grounded aversion to extravagant mental agi- 
 tation, to losing oneself in the boundlessness 
 of feeling. Their love of temperance forbade 
 it and the reaction that must follow. The 
 Greeks were masters of themselves. Excess 
 among them was rare. Always with them 
 was the sense of proportion. But profound 
 disturbances of home and state in the midst 
 of the ideas of a brilliant age now inutile, 
 moribund, foredone, may have heart-sickened 
 a finely balanced people, at a loss in the ob- 
 jective world and conscious of its empty an- 
 swer to their new inner questions. 
 
108 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 If this were true, resurgence of an ances- 
 tral faith may have come easily. Could the 
 wants of those old Hellenes, miseries induced 
 by continued disaster, by lust for power of 
 old aristocracies, by avarice of the new des- 
 pots, have opened their souls to desire for a 
 life antipathetic to the immediate past and its 
 faiths I — to the reception of gods of the great 
 magic Life of the earth, the embodiment not 
 only of the mysteries from wine but from 
 mental self-intoxication and immoderate 
 night-revels, the spirit of enthusiasm that uni- 
 fies the solitary with the general and through 
 the mystery of emotion envisages to the sub- 
 ject the living, pulsing whole and promise of 
 ever-lasting possession? In any era of his- 
 tory the emergence of a previously restricted 
 and uneducated multitude to civic freedom 
 means a refreshing and rehabilitation of re- 
 ligious enthusiasm. 
 
 A religion is the product of a single people 
 and their needs. From its very inception it 
 moves cautiously towards universalizing it- 
 self. It adapts itself and modifies foreign or 
 distasteful elements to suit its surroundings. 
 It takes here rites and there rituals and faiths 
 from those it meets and would draw within its 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 109 
 
 final crystallization. The character of a cnlt 
 and of a divinity depend really npon the char- 
 acter of the sectarian; according to a mem- 
 ber's environment and innerself he pictures 
 his divinity, conceives him with grossness or 
 with spirituality in the wise of his own sur- 
 roundings and his own nature. 
 
 Worship of Dionysus was, we have seen, a 
 religion antagonistic to many old conceptions 
 and traditions. Until some apostle with 
 racial feeling for the Hellenes' needs should 
 recast and stamp the enthusiastic fervor and 
 self-abandonment with their I'ace's instinct 
 and thought, and their race's piety, the cult 
 could bear no general meaning to G-reek life. 
 
 The religion, we said, became Grreek under 
 the name of Orphism. Possibly the shadowy 
 Orpheus, whose legend as a magical singer 
 has penetrated all centuries and inspired song 
 (even to our Shakespeare when he did sing), 
 and whose fame as a prophet interpreted the 
 imported rougher rites of Dionysus, taught 
 that the enthusiasm, the Bacchic ecstasy, was 
 a spiritual joy found in a pure and ascetic 
 life. 
 
 At the time Orphism was beginning to de- 
 velop, intercourse between Egypt and G-reece 
 
110 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 was again growing. An Egyptian puritan 
 code preached ethical ideals similar to the 
 Orphic. This puritanism and the old Thra- 
 cian cult bringing Dionysus and mighty 
 Eros, lords of life and death, before all other 
 gods, Orpheus possibly united — united so that 
 to separate the one from the other became im- 
 possible. 
 
 Orphism was an ancient system of mystic 
 puritanism, and to say puritanism is to say in- 
 dividualism, whose strength lay in an ascetic 
 ordering of life, a denial of the body. It had 
 a view of our later mediaeval times — that life 
 was a mere probation. The religion's con- 
 trolling idea was a freeing from earthly, tran- 
 sitory things. The human who adopted it 
 was no longer at one with, he was hostile to, 
 nature. Orphism was also a half-philo- 
 sophical speculation, a mysticism. Poetical 
 imagery, as in most religions, played a con- 
 siderable part. The worshiper through en- 
 thusiasm strove to remove isolation, apart- 
 ness, cleavage, and to complete identification 
 with God. Such ideas, we said, were the 
 first principles of the religion of Dionysus. 
 Possession by the god meant becoming the 
 god. The alien now was comrade and the 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 111 
 
 soul united with the absolute. A visualizing 
 of the object of worship, epiphany, happened. 
 The entering of a god or spirit into the hu- 
 man body was a not uncommon idea among 
 the Greeks. State religion recognized it in 
 the oracular possession of the Pythian priest- 
 ess, who was clearly affected by the Diony- 
 siae ecstasy. 
 
 The gods were no more gods of the old 
 Greek type, clear as the air, sensuous, simple, 
 embodying the old group feeling and patri- 
 archal. Newly created by Orphic fancies 
 they held inseparable from their godhead a 
 symbolic meaning, and also an ethical. They 
 became shifting, mystical. The Orphic Zeus 
 at times dwarfed all other gods — ^whom he in- 
 cluded; — "Zeus is the beginning; Zeus is the 
 middle; in Zeus is all complete." While ad- 
 mitting the multiplicity of higher powers, 
 Orphism laid stress upon the solidarity of the 
 universe, the identity of the individual soul 
 with the universal soul. "With the individual 
 religion was at present concerned. But the 
 dualism which divided soul and body would 
 naturally evolve to a real dualism between the 
 world and deity. 
 
 Man must free himself from evil and re- 
 
112 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 turn to God of whom lie — the immortal soul — 
 is a living part. Psyche, the soul, of heavenly 
 birth and substance, through sin and to do 
 penance for sin, became incarnate. She can 
 not loose her bonds. Natural death grants 
 her liberty — but for flitting to a purgatory be- 
 low where, the soul's "education and nutri- 
 ment," every good act in life, gains her re- 
 ward. There she rests for a space and then 
 returns to the upper air. She must be em- 
 bodied anew. As the mote floats in the sun- 
 beam so she floats, one of swarming soul-cells, 
 and enters the human body, perhaps when 
 breathing begins. She is matter, but matter 
 so delicate as to be quite invisible, to be just 
 on or beyond the border-line of visibility. 
 
 The soul wanders the wide circle of neces- 
 sity, changing habitations, entering bodies of 
 man and beast. The way is long to her lib- 
 erty. In new embodyings, to accomplish her 
 circle of births, she comes to light again and 
 again through a long series of palingeneses — 
 perhaps for ten thousand years. One single 
 earthly existence does not suffice to cleanse 
 her from original sin. She fares upon a 
 weary pilgrimage. Thus runs the wheel of 
 births. 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 113 
 
 By choice of good in life the circle may be 
 shortened'. Pindar sings that those who 
 thrice on either side of death (on earth, or in 
 the intervening period in the other world) 
 have withheld their souls from wickedness, go 
 where winds of ocean blow round the Islands 
 of the Blessed. The soul's deeds in the one 
 life will avail her allotment in the next. 
 What a man did to others he must exactly 
 suffer himself, his soul is degraded by its 
 guilt to penitential punishment, to atonement. 
 Thus he pays full penance for his sins. 
 Orphism emphasized the ethical conscious- 
 ness. Upon the ground of her purity the soul 
 based her claims to everlasting bliss. In 
 Orphism consideration of sin is subjective. 
 In the Homeric centuries it had been object- 
 ive. 
 
 Still, escape from her imprisonment is open 
 to the soul, the psyche, of man. She may be- 
 come free from another birth and separate 
 herself from becoming and decay. She may 
 buoy herself by the hope of leaving the wheel 
 of necessity and misery. There is a freeing 
 from the clay in which the soul lies coffined, a 
 prisoner in a prison, a shellfish in its shell. 
 Blind men can not help themselves even if the 
 
114 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 healing is at hand. Orpheus brings hale. 
 Demiurgic Eros, and Dionysus and his 
 Bacchic train, will free. By the grace of the 
 freeing gods a man shall be free, not by his 
 own strength but by the enthusiasm of the 
 god. 
 
 The soul may become pure, free from all 
 spot by Orphic consecration and Orphic life. 
 "Purity" was the ringing cry of Orphism. 
 Even the postulant, the initiate, robed in a 
 linen tunic, symbolic white, must purify him- 
 self by baths, by forbearance from certain 
 foods, by charms against malevolent spirits 
 and by that himiility of spirit that finds exer- 
 cise in self-examination. Such purification 
 was necessary for deliverance. Purity of life 
 was a condition of membership. "When pure 
 the soul is free and will no more suffer in- 
 carnation. She will live in the sempiternal 
 joys of paradise, she who sprang from God 
 and is godlike. 
 
 In the blissful life of the blessed, the soul, 
 in conscious union with God, dwells in a land 
 where is no freezing cold nor heat but gentle 
 airs, where bounteous seasons bring in every 
 fruit, and fountains water flower-starred 
 meadows. "Upon the righteous," sang the 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 115 
 
 OrpMc Pindar, "the glorious sun sMneth, 
 while here below it is night, and ia meadows 
 red with roses round their city gates and hazy 
 with frankincense and laden with golden 
 fruits. . . . and among them fair-flowered 
 happiness blooms, and over that lovely land 
 move sweet scents and mingle with the far- 
 shining fire on the altar of the gods. ' ' In un- 
 mixed delight the soul gladdens in services to 
 the gods and in pursuit of wisdom, in the 
 music of choruses, the drama of the poets and 
 in banquets, according to the dialogue 
 "Axiochus," at one time ascribed to Plato. 
 Through the "Phsdo" we see the eye of 
 Socrates ia his last moments dwelling on a 
 like paradise. These traditional hopes, famil- 
 iar to us in their material, were sung to and 
 by Orphic Hellenes, and were the natural and 
 spontaneous beliefs of their faith acting upon 
 an imaginative people.^ 
 
 ^ Many retellings of this old Orphic inspiration are 
 still current and in many tongues. Essentially poetic, 
 its subject caught the medieval fancy when "a good 
 dose of materialism" kept the people's health. An 
 Italian bishop, Damiani, and a monk of Brittany, Ber- 
 nard of Clugny, for instance, embodied it in the noble 
 Latin hymns, "De Gloria et Gaudiis Paradisi," "Laus 
 Patriffl CEelestis." One greater, Dante, treated it with 
 
116 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Faith, in the immortal life-strength of the 
 soul is the keynote of the Orphic religion. 
 The soul's union with the body and its exer- 
 cises are a punishment of which she is ever 
 striving to be free. "I am a child of earth 
 and starry heaven;" "Out of the pure I 
 came;" "I have flown out of the sorrowful 
 weary circle;" "I have paid the penalty for 
 deeds of iniquity," sing various gold tablets 
 found in ancient tombs and undeniably voic- 
 ing the Orphic cult even of this earlier period. 
 
 Transmigration of souls, in its simplest ex- 
 pression, has been a belief common to many 
 peoples. It is a carrying to extreme logic the 
 faith of submergence of the individual in 
 tribal life, the progression of the group emo- 
 tion to its furthest limit. The moral factor 
 of palingenesis, that of purifying heart and 
 ennobling soul and all desires and instincts, 
 
 imaginative and speculative enthusiasm. English poets 
 of inspiration have voiced it, for instance the sixteenth 
 century author of the beautifur"Oh, Mother dear, Jeru- 
 salem," and the nineteenth century Keats in his sensu- 
 ous ode, "Bards of Passion and of Mirth." In German 
 we have it in such poems as Riickert's 
 
 "Das Paradies muss schoner sein 
 Als jeder Ort auf Erden." 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 117 
 
 rising on dead selves to higher things, strug- 
 gles in the long evolution of the doctrine of 
 metempsychosis. 
 
 Thus the Dionysus cult those evolving 
 Greeks took and hellenized — and to hellenize 
 was to humanize. In Boeotia and Argolis, and 
 at Delphi, traditions of the north prevailed, 
 and at Thebes * women kept to Dionysus a 
 three-yearly festival, the ecstatic ritual and 
 orgiastic tumult held at night on Mount Ci- 
 thaeron. But of the old Thracian enthusiasm 
 the feast at Athens came hardly to show a 
 vestige — although enthusiasm, the expression 
 of a loftier and more gifted spirit than a 
 human's own common mood, possession by a 
 higher power apparent through words or 
 actions, was attributed to the inspiration of a 
 god by later Athenians and especially in the 
 writings of Plato. 
 
 Originally worshipers of Dionysus held 
 him, with Eros, as source of moving life in 
 
 * "0 Baeelius, dweller in Thebes, mother-city of Bac- 
 chants." "Of all cities, Thebes, thou boldest first in 
 honor." "0 leader of the stars whose breath is fire, 
 master of sounds of the night, son begotten of Zeus, 
 appear, lord, with thy encircling Bacchantes who, in 
 night-long frenzy dance to thee, the dispenser, lacchus." 
 1121-22; 1137-38; 1146-55 Antigone. 
 
118 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 nature, tte magic workman of all growing 
 tMngs, the prosperer of tlie whole content 
 of life, even of the exuberant pleasure that 
 expresses itself in dancing and in every joy. 
 His abundance of vitality made him a pro- 
 tector from daemons. Inevitably his cult 
 tended to the matriarchal — a religion finding 
 root in the worship of Mother Earth and her 
 Son, the fruit thereof. "With legends at those 
 times still in popular survival and also in ac- 
 cord with the breadth and inclusiveness of a 
 matriarchal cult, it recognized women's natu- 
 ral piety and susceptibility to extreme emo- 
 tion. Women were ministrants — the mae- 
 nads, distinguished votaries of Dionysus, pos- 
 sibly survivals of the then far-ancient minis- 
 trants called Amazons and their rites in the 
 service of Earth Mother. 
 
 Adoption of the Dionysus religion and its 
 development as a public cult proved in the end 
 a mighty impulse to Hellas. Art opened a 
 perfect form in the worship. That very all- 
 inclusive beauty of Greek poetry, tragedy, 
 grew, perhaps, out of a masque of the seasons 
 in which the god was slain and lamented by 
 mummers clad in goat-skins. And Attic 
 comedy, it has been suggested, evolved pos- 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 119 
 
 sibly from a purificatory rite when bearers of 
 symbols of fertility came through the central 
 door of the theater at the festival of Lensea 
 and reviled certain of the audience. 
 
 Orphism had substantial foundation in 
 Greece before the sixth century before Christ 
 — a century curiously fertile in religious 
 manifestations in lands far east of Greece. 
 But when Onomacritus, a singer of Bacchic 
 initiation songs and with Pherecydes of Syros 
 founder of the Orphic brotherhood at Athens, 
 dwelt as a guest at the court of Peisistratus — 
 from this association the faith gained the sup- 
 port of the state. The Peisistratid family 
 personified the tyrannus idea at Athens. 
 Orphism and the tyrannus went hand in hand, 
 not only at Athens but at Corinth, Sicyon and 
 elsewhere. The religion was a reflex as well 
 as a cause of the condition into which society 
 had come. Both religion and social condi- 
 tion were antagonistic to the old traditions. 
 Both voiced the same social consciousness and 
 the same social divisions and both recognized 
 the people of towns and tillers of the soil. 
 The nether orders, called "lower" because 
 others rear their structure upon their 
 strength, were asserting themselves and ris- 
 
120 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 ing to power in the affairs of life. Old gods 
 had not redressed long-time inequalities or 
 softened the hardness of the oligarchs. New, 
 or renewed, gods might. 
 
 Orphism cheered men by saying that each 
 and every one conld attain to divine life, to 
 inxmortality. In an age when there survived 
 the old teaching that it was heaven-storming 
 insolence to seek to be a god, the individual- 
 ism of Orphism gave courage to seek to be 
 united to God those who were already God. 
 Orphism taught in another way than the old 
 epic the divinity of humanity. 
 
 But Orphic puritanism, and the solidarity 
 of the conventicle to which converts pledged 
 themselves, did not wholly take the place of 
 the old aristocrats' Olympian religion. The 
 old faith consecrated all ceremonial civic func- 
 tions. Orphics still worshiped at the solemn 
 old festivals of the gods which the state or- 
 dained. 
 
 In the older religion a tribe divinity had 
 still the magnet of a tribe 's devotion, and the 
 religious influence that adheres to such ideas. 
 An instance most potent was a splendid festi- 
 val held periodically at the island of Delos, all 
 Ionic cities uniting in its imposing celebra- 
 
DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 121 
 
 tion; when, says an old hymn, one seeing the 
 grace of all and rejoicing in their spirit, 
 would call the assembled lonians ageless and 
 deathless, the men and the lovely belted 
 woman. Dionysus came too late to become a 
 communal forbear, to represent the projected 
 consciousness of the old group. Orphics ob- 
 served still, we say, old tribal and local loyal- 
 ties and oblations. But Eros, passion-stir- 
 ring, and Bacchus, vital principle, were their 
 real gods. 
 
 The old nobles ' religion had little expansive 
 concern for immortality. Realities on this 
 earth prevailed. Content with their life as it 
 was and for generations had been naturally 
 filled the breasts of the ruling orders. 
 Homeric ideas show traces of a doctrine of 
 retribution. But the Orphic faith brought 
 confidence in punishment of evil deeds and 
 the rewards of righteousness. For the ills 
 and inequalities of earth converts declared the 
 glories of an everlasting bliss should be theirs. 
 If a soul could not realize itself here — if on 
 this earth vice had not its meed and virtue 
 were its slave or dupe, if "Captive Good at- 
 tending Captain 111" were ever true — ^the soul 
 may turn its vision to another world for the 
 
122 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 balance of justice, tKe world after death. 
 The gods would grant redress, would strike a 
 balance, for the sufferings of the oppressed. 
 
 Here is a distinct step in human evolution 
 and mental refinement — since the ethical esti- 
 mate of the heroic age, when gods were non- 
 moral, to this phase of the Greek spirit when 
 gods became guardians of righteousness. 
 Justice and evolving conceptions of law stood 
 among the great gods of the Orphic pantheon. 
 Teachings of an implacable justice, the Hel- 
 lenes' setting out of the Hebraic conception 
 of the sins of father upon children, the early- 
 Solon sang in his elegies, "Fruits of insolence 
 and wrong bring vengeance, sure even if 
 slow. . . . Perhaps the guilt escapes, but his 
 blameless children, or distant posterity pay 
 the penalty." 
 
 Orphic cosmogony pictured the becoming 
 and growth of the world out of a dark, driving 
 power into the clear, definite manifoldness of 
 the cosmos — a long train of godlike forces 
 winding and overwinding one another in the 
 world's orderly formation. This teaching of 
 the generation of the universe was like that 
 of old religions, for instance, the Persian, to 
 which Orphism was doubtless related. 
 
ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 123 
 
 Sucli a faith had its historic mission. It 
 succored the growth of men's conscience and 
 deepened their inner life. It inculcated dis- 
 dain for the goods and successes of the world 
 which had been controlling — for renown, for 
 war and its grossnesses. Another result was 
 a gloom, an asceticism at odds with the old, 
 commonly prevalent view of life as a buoyant 
 beauty, a harmony. Ideas such as these are 
 engendered and enunciated, it has been said, 
 by a people who disavow power and force oi; 
 are without such factors. 
 
 But the central and finally most popular 
 worship of the Dionysus idea, that which 
 probably more completely set forth the doc- 
 trine and was not so much a mass of loosely 
 united beliefs, a worship clearly allied to 
 Orphism in secrecy, in revocation of the crea- 
 tive impulse, in expiatory rites and purifica- 
 tions, were the great Eleusinian Mysteries, a 
 passion play sacred to divinities of the earth 
 — a setting forth of the holy history of Hades ' 
 theft of Core, as she among meadow grasses 
 gathered the strange flower of the narcissus ; 
 the maid's translation to the god's realms be- 
 low ; the wandering quest of her mother, De- 
 meter, up and down the earth; the poignant 
 
124 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 sorrows of Mater Dolorosa ; and the final re- 
 union of Mother and Child. ' ' And, ' ' sang an 
 old hymn, "Zeus decreed that Persephone 
 should remain two parts of the year with her 
 mother, and one third part only with her hus- 
 band in the kingdom of the dead." 
 
 The secret worship centering about this 
 beautiful story fell near the end of our Sep- 
 tember amid the agricultural people of the 
 fertile plain of Eleusis, a little town hugging 
 the sea-ooast across from Salamis, some four- 
 teen miles from Athens. There, legend told, 
 Persephone had returned to her mother after 
 she had come with Hermes from Hades' king- 
 dom below. The rites, fabled to have been es- 
 tablished by the Thracian Eumolpus, doubt- 
 less dated to those pre-Greek days when 
 Mother Earth was Great Goddess and every 
 settlement of ^gean folk had its Lady of the 
 Corn, or of abundance of crops and fertility 
 of flocks.^ Demeter, sender-up of gifts, signi- 
 
 " Persistence of local cults among Mediterranean peo- 
 ples has been through millennia and down to our own 
 time. Demeter, not a personified principle but a real 
 personal power, "the mistress of the world," a living, 
 benevolent divinity dwelling in the heart of a mountain, 
 is worshiped to this day in Greece. In the last cen- 
 tury tillers of the soil, natives of this very plain of 
 
ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 125 
 
 fied th-e eartli, not tlie mere material of the 
 earth-body — Graia was that — ^but the lady-pro- 
 ducer, the lady-nourisher of what grows out 
 of the earth. Persephone, her daughter, was 
 the seed corn and the fruit of the fields. The 
 robbery of Core symbolized the sinking of 
 seed com in the earth; her return the coming 
 of the seed plant from the soil — the yearly 
 going under and the renewing of vegetation. 
 
 In their origin the rites were probably a 
 celebration of a harvest festival, and magic 
 ceremonies to further food supply. Such 
 practices might also celebrate invigorating of 
 life-force and the process of plowing and 
 sowing. Profounder spiritual significance 
 they might have gained in later times in 
 elaboration of the cult of Dionysus. lacchus, 
 "giver of wealth," "dispenser of men's fate," 
 as the vegetation god would be in the world, 
 "daemon of Demeter, founder of the Mys- 
 
 Eleusis, cherished a statue of Demeter after a Chris- 
 tianized ritual naming it St. Demetra, a saint not in 
 ecclesiastical canon and entirely unknown elsewhere. In 
 his "Modem Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Reli- 
 gion," Mr. J. C. Lawson tells that the statue "in spite of 
 a riot among the peasants of Eleusis" was removed and 
 "is now a little-regarded object catalogued as 'No. XIV, 
 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (much mutilated).'" 
 
126 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 teries, ' ' was an Eleusinian name of Dionysus, 
 perhaps derived from Ms "worshipers' cry of 
 joy. 
 
 The religious pantomime of the Eleusinian 
 Mysteries was not the sole sacred drama in 
 Hellas. Eepresentations of phases of the life 
 of the gods, feasts to Zeus, to Here, to Apollo 
 were part of a widely distributed cult prac- 
 tice, and mystery cults were potent, for in- 
 stance, that of Hecate at -iEgina and of Ge at 
 Phyle. The Eleusinian was distinctive 
 through the outlook it gave its attendants. 
 During the centuries of its most marked 
 growth individuahty in all relations was 
 evolving. Contemplation of the fate of the 
 seed com personified in Persephone — the dis- 
 appearance of the corn from the earth and its 
 return — afforded insight into the destiny of 
 the individual human soul, of man's birth and 
 rebirth. In this we have the unity of the old 
 Greek faith, that human life is not a segre- 
 gated thing, but a part of the whole vegeta- 
 tive and animal world. The soul disappears 
 in order to live, just as the seed.® That was 
 
 " This meditation the zeal of Paul set down centuries 
 later in a letter to Christian converts at Corinth, in sen- 
 tences of remarkable beauty and the same analogical 
 
ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 127 
 
 the sum of the sacred secret — the soul disap- 
 pears in order to live. "The Athenians of 
 old," said Plutarch, "called the dead Deme- 
 ter's people" — people of Earth Mother. 
 
 By the mystic, purificatory ceremony at 
 Eleusis the worshiper of the solemn god- 
 desses, the Mother and the Daughter, and 
 their associated gods, for instance Triptole- 
 mus, plower and distributer of grain for 
 sowing, the initiate might hold privileged re- 
 lations with the divinities, a communion, and 
 hope for success in life and better fortune 
 after death. ' ' Of men who go about upon the 
 earth, he is happy who has seen these things," 
 sang an old hymn of the worship, "He who 
 has not shared in them has by no means an 
 equal fate in the gloom of the nether world." 
 Not only that the soul freed from the body 
 lives — brighter and more comforting thoughts 
 of how she will live these Mysteries taught 
 men. That is, the initiate won at Eleusis a 
 lively setting forth of the existence of the de- 
 parted soul "being god-beloved and dwelling 
 with the gods." 
 
 Originally a tribal privilege, probably an 
 
 reasoning; "That which, thou sowest is not quickened ex- 
 cept it die," etc. 
 
128 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 occasion "when each, member of the group so- 
 cialized his soul by pledging it to the soul of 
 the congregation, the Mysteries in the fifth 
 century before Christ invited the whole Hel- 
 lenic world to share their spiritual life. 
 Their membership became widespread, and 
 they had long-continued reverence. Initia- 
 tion was only by the individual's free act and 
 election. The candidates, who had had in- 
 struction from the leader of the Mysteries and 
 introduction to the Lesser Mysteries months 
 before, must confess themselves to be pure in 
 hand, that is, with no blood guiltiness, and 
 they should have followed rules of abstinence 
 and fasting. "Let no one enter," read a 
 solemn proclamation used at one time, 
 "whose hands are not clean and whose tongue 
 is not prudent. ' ' 
 
 Upon assembling the candidates must go 
 to the seashore to purify themselves with salt 
 water, a baptism or laver of regeneration. A 
 cathartic ritual, sprinkling with the blood of a 
 pig — and possibly a pig because the sow had 
 been a symbol of fertility — may then have 
 followed. After a sacrifice, perhaps, and an 
 interval of two days, the great procession 
 started from Athens to Eleusis bearing a 
 
ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 129 
 
 representation of the god lacclius. With 
 shrines to visit on the way, and with sacri- 
 fices, their march must have been slow. They 
 would reach Eleusis on the same night, or on 
 the following, fatigued, in that state of body 
 when through fasting and ritual the mind 
 would be given to hallucination. Under the 
 stars with lacchus there followed a midnight 
 meeting, and, in the Mystery hall (Ictinus, 
 architect of the Parthenon, built later the 
 splendid temple of Demeter) two or more 
 days of sacred drama. 
 
 The eight priests and priestesses of the 
 ceremonies may at this time have given an ap- 
 pealing play of the taking away of Core, the 
 sorrow of the Mother, the reunion of the two, 
 the mission of Triptolemus. That is, the play 
 may have symbolized the poetry of nature, 
 the drama each year enacts during spring, 
 summer and winter. And thus it may have 
 taught of human life, and poetized the hope of 
 a world where death gives place to life. 
 The very character of mystery — reserve for 
 the initiate — keeps us from exact knowledge 
 of what was done. 
 
 Perhaps the drama pictured, through the 
 loss of the Daughter, separation by death, the 
 
130 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 sorrow of the living, the consoling faith of an 
 ultimate reunion. In this way the soul, feel- 
 ing a personal communion with the divine 
 would be purified and lifted to a new life. It 
 is difficult to believe any part of the solemni- 
 ties to have been obscene, as early Christian 
 writers averred. When the Hellenes said 
 they were "unspeakable" they meant not un- 
 namably impure, but unnamably and mys- 
 teriously holy. They appealed to and com- 
 forted most refined minds. If they repre- 
 sented a union of the human and divine, a 
 pledge of intimate association with immortals 
 in another world, the fasting and reduction 
 of the body's normal strength at their rites 
 may have led to reaction, excess, afterwards — 
 just as at the fast of Eamazan the Moham- 
 medan's self-restraint of the day gives way 
 to indulgence in nightly feasts, or as our 
 present-day Lenten denials generate ab- 
 normal feasts at Easter. 
 
 ' ' Demeter . . . gave our ancestors twofold 
 gifts," said Isocrates in his Panegyricus, 
 "those fruits of the earth which saved us 
 from living the life of wild beasts, and the 
 rites which make happier the sharers of it, 
 both concerning the end of life and existence 
 
ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 131 
 
 forever." "Wlieii we die," wrote Plutarch 
 much later, yet bearing the faith of a believer, 
 "we are like those being initiated into the 
 Mystery. . . , Our whole life is but a succes- 
 sion of wanderings, of painful goings about, 
 of journeys by devious ways with no outlet. 
 At the moment of quitting it, fears, horrors, 
 palpitations, deathly sweats and stupor come 
 upon and overwhelm us. But as soon as we 
 are past it, pure places and meadows open 
 to us, with voices and dances and sacred 
 words and holy sights. There a man having 
 become initiate and perfect, free and lord of 
 self, celebrates, crowned with myrtle, most 
 solemn mysteries, converses with righteous 
 and pure souls, looking down upon the im- 
 pure numbers of the uninitiate sinking in the 
 mire and fog beneath — ^by fear of death and 
 by lack of faith in a life to come abiding in 
 their miseries." 
 
 In the mystic celebration the Eumolpidse 
 preserved rights of apostolic succession 
 from the founder. From that family was 
 chosen an official who, clad in rich rai- 
 ment, acted as Hierophantes, the word mean- 
 ing one who shows forth sacred things. 
 Consecrated to his function for life, and in 
 
132 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 later generations vowed to celibacy and con- 
 tinual chastity, he alone could enter inmost 
 penetralia of the hall of the Mysteries. Any 
 candidate his holiness thought unfit for the 
 communion he might refuse. 
 
 With the assurance of fixed, religious or- 
 ganizations, the sentiment doubtless dating 
 back to early group-feeling, the Eleusinian 
 community came to divide mankind into two 
 classes — the pure, those initiate of the 
 Eleusinian rites, and the mass not initiate. 
 Mankind was not divided into the good and 
 wicked, another has pointed out. Not as hu- 
 man beings, and not as virtuous and pious 
 human beings should men and women expect 
 a happy life in the world to come— rather 
 only as members of the Eleusinian company 
 of worshipers and participators in the Eleu- 
 sinian services. Ethical merit, the merit of a 
 citizen of ideal type, had in that estimate lit- 
 tle accounting. Obedience to ritualistic form- 
 ulae, the visionary merit of union with the 
 body, alone determined — a recrudescence, 
 again we say, or survival of the old, dominat- 
 ing soul of the group. Happiness, an initiate 
 declares in the quotation above, was in pros- 
 pect for members of the sacred mystery only. 
 
ELEUSIXIAN MYSTERIES 133 
 
 Thej^ alone dared entertain pious expecta- 
 tions of a real life hereafter. They alone 
 might have the serenity of true expectancy, a 
 privilege gained in no other way than through 
 sharing the celebration and partaking of the 
 blessed feast of fellowship, wheat cakes or 
 bread sacred to Demeter and wine dedicated 
 to Dionysus. Religion, so far as this popu- 
 lar sense went, was merely an otiose assent 
 to prevailing forms and symbols. Purifica- 
 tion by ritual doubtless had its origin in 
 magic, — in an elaboration in approaching the 
 unseen superhuman power and then a substi- 
 tution of the form of approach for the power 
 itself. But such purification may have led to 
 some degree of purification by ethical ideals. 
 "There is sure and joyous light to us alone," 
 sang the song which Dionysus heard in the 
 meadows of the Blessed, "to us who have 
 been initiated and have lived reverently to- 
 wards strangers and private folk." 
 
 The practical irreasons of the faith were a 
 reaction from the old heroic independence 
 and the sanity of the Hellenic mind. Homer 
 was far from vaunting expiatory ceremonies, 
 mystic rites and religious brotherhoods. He 
 refers to few superstitions. Perchance their 
 
134 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 magic had. little aseendence among the folk 
 for whom he sang. 
 
 If the simple, primal consciousness of the 
 old Greeks of the epic age was broken, the in- 
 dividual, isolated soul certainly counted for 
 more than when the king of sacrifices stood 
 before the more physical gods of Olympus and 
 voiced his community's consciousness of the 
 human and divine. Now a pious man must 
 look for soul-help in the ritual and observ- 
 ance of an externalized order. He had need 
 of a larger revelation and the mediation of a 
 greater master, of some mystery, some magic, 
 outside his group's, to show the way to the 
 soul's hale. The Mysteries brought the 
 proclamation to the world, said a decree of 
 the second century before Christ, "that the 
 greatest good among men is fellowship and 
 faith." 
 
 In the spiritual development of a people 
 supernatural therapeutics, wonder-working 
 and exorcism long forerun the philosophers. 
 Practices of magic and witchcraft and purifi- 
 catory superstitions are of earlier ages; or 
 of a substratum of the people of later times — 
 long practiced in secret and at some favor- 
 ing juncture taking on vigor in open air. 
 
PRACTICES OF MAGIC: SUPERSTITIONS 135 
 
 Now, in Hellas, sorceries were not a sudden 
 growth or arbitrary invention. They were 
 doubtless deep rooted in long anterior centu- 
 ries and had been men's resort to the superhu- 
 man for the guidance of life. Possibly in 
 these times they suffered a renewal of 
 strength through crises in the people's life, 
 and in that ineradicable human feeling that 
 would pry into and divine the future and en- 
 deavor to avert its possible evil. Dionysus, 
 the earth-sap god, the granter of ecstasy, was 
 also a healer, an inpourer of the power of 
 soothsaying. 
 
 During the waxing of Hellenic society in 
 these individualizing centuries — from scat- 
 tered dwellers over the face of a country and 
 in the bonds of patriarchal kingdoms to the 
 unity of vigorous, sizable cities and sanitary 
 care necessary where people are grouped to- 
 gether, cleansing and purification became 
 needful in the same ratio that human life 
 grew in esteem and preciousness. Disease, 
 unseen, lurking endemic pests engendered by 
 the crowding together of men, denser popula- 
 tion in our present-day phrase, must have 
 struck the Greeks with a bold hand in their 
 town building and then unknowledge of sani- 
 
136 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 tation. As in the Iliad the plague witnessing 
 divine anger at Agamenmon's sin made puri- 
 fication necessary, so now in many places 
 some malefic god was at hand, some daemon 
 of the earth or underworld, whose works 
 were turned by ceremonialism and magic 
 of fumigation and fire, who also de- 
 parted after ablution. Beating of bronze 
 clappers, cymbals, freed from hostile, inter- 
 ruptive daemons the spirit that makes crops 
 grow, just as, it has been said, the gong in the 
 grove at Dodona preserved by its continuous 
 clang the sacred ground from malignant in- 
 fluences.''' Thus these folk imaginatively 
 traced origin with a glimmer of light, and 
 science gleams in the midst of ancient charla- 
 tanry. In considering their practices we 
 must not forget that between magic, depend- 
 ence upon a supernatural power for guid- 
 ance, and religion, there is only the distinc- 
 tion of growth, both being phases of reliance 
 on or union with a supreme power. 
 
 ' By the same token bells were a prophylactic for they 
 inspired terror in evil spirits. Therefore, in later cen- 
 turies, the Christian church hung them in their towers, 
 where they pealed at the passing of a soul and in their 
 call defended the congregation from ill. 
 
PRACTICES OF MAGIC: SUPERSTITIONS 137 
 
 From Crete, an ancient home of thau- 
 maturgy for -^gean peoples, Thaletas came 
 to Laced«mon to rid the Spartans of a 
 plague through his music and hymns to the 
 gods,® and at Athens the Cretan Epimenides, 
 an ally of Solon, healed the people of a pesti- 
 lence and despondency and salutarily lifted 
 their hearts. Many a small stream of ex- 
 purgatory rites and demonology flowed into 
 and colored the larger stream of Greek re- 
 ligion. 
 
 When, we say, with grouping of humans in 
 cities need of cleansing from defilement cried 
 aloud, mental confusion as to cause of pollu- 
 tion led doubtless to a reinvigoration of the 
 exorcist and to practices of magic in cleans- 
 ing from imaginary defilement — to cere- 
 monies of cursing to avert evil luck and bring 
 good ; freeing the habitation, the doorpost, the 
 field, from vague, malevolent bogeys and 
 ghosts ; to ridding from pollution the person 
 of the newborn child and the mother after 
 the birth of the child; to magnetiziug the 
 weather to drive away disease. Ker was a 
 generic name of this corrupting thing, this 
 
 * To-day peoples of Calabria free themselves from 
 earthquake by like processes. 
 
138 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 fate of death, this bacillus of disease. The 
 word also meant ancestral ghost. Fantastic 
 expiation freed the murderer from blood- 
 guiltiness, and afflicted men might purify 
 themselves from daemons. 
 
 From the eighth to the sixth century men 
 and women prophets, exorcists and purifiers, 
 often degraders of Orphic precepts, seizing 
 upon the mental nervousness and supersti- 
 tions of the weaker, wandered through 
 Greece. Their very being evidences the 
 spread of a mysticism, the endeavor of a 
 people burdened with the ills of their un- 
 settled life, pulsing with the effort to pass 
 the narrow horizon of every-day conscious- 
 ness to the heights of unbounded vision and 
 communion with the divine. 
 
 Eeligious doctrines we have considered sub- 
 jected their initiate to rule and symbol. 
 Like all symbolic religions they promoted the 
 idea that observance of forms and ceremonies 
 would wipe away moral consciousness of sin — 
 nay, even sin itself. Consequently, but still 
 later than this age, for Plato tells of it, a 
 sorcery so un-Hellenic, gross and grotesque 
 gained way that certain mystagogues, mendi- 
 cant friars and soothsayers peddled to the 
 
PRACTICES OF MAGIC: SUPERSTITIONS 139 
 
 doors of the rich, and even to Greek cities, 
 power to heal in agreeable way of sacrifice 
 and rite whatever sin burdened the sonl — ■ 
 promising absolution, effective both in this 
 world and the next, a patent spiritual nos- 
 trum to protect the soul from a wrath which 
 their Hellenic sense of justice meted should 
 come. "They redeem us from the pains of 
 hell ; if we neglect them, no one knows what is 
 waiting for us. ' ' 
 
 Among the confused and bizarre and non- 
 Hellenic powers in this current of imposture 
 was Hecate of the three-fold form, daughter 
 of the sky of night, mother of midnight ter- 
 rors, dwelling in the underworld, who found 
 her way to the abode of the living more lightly 
 than other nether-abode dwellers. She was 
 by when a soul bound itself to a body, and 
 even at the birth of wild animals. When 
 a soul parted from its body she was also there. 
 She was goddess of souls bound to another 
 world. Her haunts were gravestones, and 
 the solemn honors of the cult of the dead. 
 The half-light of the moon, with which lumi- 
 nary she had some occult connection, showed 
 her course by night. She flitted over cross- 
 roads. There stood her image; and also be- 
 
140 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 fore thresliolds of houses to ward off evil 
 spirits. At tlie forking of three ways, likely 
 spot for ghosts, was also her worship. In 
 haunted places she was invoked for her 
 power to send from the earth horrid forms. 
 Souls whose burial had been unattended by 
 holy rites were her servitors, or those 'who 
 used violence in life or died before their 
 time — souls that find no peace after death 
 but whirl in the wind with this magical, spell- 
 binding goddess and her troop of dsemon 
 dogs, bringing epilepsy, madness, disease, to 
 whomsoever they meet. 
 
 This and kindred legends — the "under- 
 world" of the intellect of that time, the 
 nether side of the beauty and brightness that 
 was distinguishing its progress — doubtless 
 voiced a people and their magic at the time 
 of their inception. They voice fear. In the 
 religion of monarchies of Babylon and As- 
 syria in the time of the magic's seeming re- 
 vival, a potent factor was fear of swarming, 
 malignant beings of grotesque shape, delete- 
 rious and destructive to human life, always 
 on the watch to undo unguarded mortals. In 
 the Hellenes' us.e the legends bear also an- 
 other witness — the conception of the interde- 
 
BEGINNINGS OP PHILOSOPHY 141 
 
 pendence of all being and growth — a convic- 
 tion often allowing itself expression in terms 
 of the night-side of nature. 
 
 EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY, AND PHYSICS 
 FORECASTING MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 Another mark of this second phase of the 
 Greek spirit — of the reflection with which the 
 Greek began to consider life and the world 
 and their problems— is found in the begin- 
 nings of philosophy. The human spirit, in 
 other than social and religious phases, joys 
 in new regions and a growing consciousness 
 of self. It essays another form akin to re- 
 Ugion in conception, aim and comprehensive- 
 ness. To the thinker the universe must be 
 fresh-bom, as to colonists of active life ex- 
 ploring untried seas and penetrating prime- 
 val forests. New perceptions must combine 
 and set out experiences afresh. The world 
 must have a simple, rational explanation ; life, 
 a profound and self -satisfying aim. 
 
 Search for truth and that noble wisdom 
 whose fruits are reverence and calm seized 
 upon men's souls as a great enthusiasm. 
 The world is wide and wonderful, and those 
 
142 THK GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 early thinkers of Hellas could little see how 
 long would be their search — and, forsooth, 
 the search of man for many centuries to fol- 
 low. It was the hope of every wisdom-lover 
 to solve the great evanishing mystery. What 
 the piimordial source from which all came? 
 How reduce endless variety — change, change 
 — to unity? And man's relations to this va- 
 riety — what are the laws and what transcend- 
 ent truth? What is the spiritual light for 
 things as we see them — for the world of 
 nature ? 
 
 Earnestness made the Greeks seekers. We 
 know attempted answers of theirs. The 
 more we ponder, the profounder is our as- 
 tonishment at their magnificently prophetic 
 outlines. Modern science seems in many 
 ways but the larger reading of those old 
 philosophies. With the sympathy and per- 
 ception with which in the long past their race 
 had from the mysterious beauties of the 
 earth, and its ensphering universe, evolved 
 their objective religion and bred their epic 
 art, so now the Hellenes incarnated scientific 
 analysis of nature. That is, that energy of 
 the imagination which had wrought lasting 
 work in epic song, and in a poetic, synthetic 
 
BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 143 
 
 religion, now turned its insight to analytic, 
 scientific enquiry and bore fruitful forecasts 
 in more formal divisions. Science is a 
 younger-born sister of poetry. The history 
 of the Hellenes' science affords authoritative 
 data in tracing their evolution. That which 
 we call their philosophy is an imagination, a 
 vision of life of certain of their seers — in 
 which vision reason, thought, imagination, 
 dominate rather than the emotion. 
 
 The imaginative reasoning of those Greek 
 penetrators led them to their belief in the 
 indestructibility of matter, and in the ex- 
 istence of elements — they went so far in con- 
 ception as to seek to reduce all diverse things 
 they saw to some fundamental element. 
 They felt the unity under multiplicity that 
 modern science proclaims, the common sub- 
 stance and the aspiring law that draws chaos 
 to cosmos. We can not generalize their en- 
 deavors, their individuality forbids. Let us 
 glance at a few of their efforts seriatim. 
 
 The first cradle of this new reflection of the 
 Greeks was the coast of Asia Minor. Bound 
 the name of Thales of Miletus (said to have 
 been bom 640 B. C.) group reports of dis- 
 coveries. In putting his efforts in the field 
 
144 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 of sensible phenomena he showed the racial 
 character of his fellow lonians. In his at- 
 tempts to explain the world, the Hellenes' 
 abiding love of science. 
 
 Matter was to Thales a living thing. It 
 was endowed with energy, and motion was a 
 result of life. There is an indwelling soul — 
 "all things are full of gods," he said. This 
 suggests the modern "prepotency," "inter- 
 nal, perfecting principle." A divine power 
 pervades the elementary moisture and gives 
 it motion. All things are therefore water 
 variously transformed and capable of trans- 
 formation. Thales came to this fundamental 
 dogma, suggests Aristotle, by observation of 
 the part warm, damp, organic matter plays 
 in the production and keeping of life. 
 
 This philosopher of Miletus is said to have 
 introduced geometry into Greece, to have 
 determined that the angles at the base of 
 an isosceles triangle are equal and that the 
 circle is bisected by its diameter. Before 
 his time the Egyptians had gained the ele- 
 ments of geometry in measuring lands made 
 fertile by the floods of the Nile. Again 
 Thales had such wisdom of the stars that he 
 could and did predict a total eclipse — ^which 
 
BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 145 
 
 occurred in tlie war between Lydia and Media 
 on the 28tli of May, 585 B. C. But already 
 tlie Chaldeans, thinking the stars in their 
 clear sky above were in harmony with human 
 affairs below, and that it were possible to 
 solve enigmata of the earth by motions in the 
 heavens, had blazed a trail in stellar myster- 
 ies and in quest of pseudo-astrology had 
 found laws of astronomy. 
 
 Anaximander, coming a generation after 
 Thales, holding to the doctrine that matter is 
 by nature endowed with life, reasoned that 
 the first principle is the infinite, without be- 
 ginning and without end, at once material and 
 divine, his &Kupov. Each separate exist- 
 ence, an upstart, must in equity decline in a 
 world in which antagonism and mutual ex- 
 termination prevail. The independent, pri- 
 mary substance again and again absorbs such 
 existences, and another process of individuali- 
 zation follows. This echoes of the Orphics 
 and betrays a moral and religious suggestion. 
 From dnupov, without beginning and with- 
 out end, warm and cold, moist and dry, pro- 
 gressively differentiate. 
 
 Anaximander declared, although with much 
 that was crudest in cosmogony, that the 
 
146 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 earth, had in cosmic periods been in a fluid 
 state, that under the beneficence of warmth, 
 living beings gradually developed in the sea- 
 slime, that land animals in the beginning had 
 the form of fishes and upon the drying of the 
 surface of the earth — at many places he had 
 seen the retreating of the Mediterranean — 
 they took on their land form. At the begin- 
 ning man was generated from all kinds of 
 animals ; all the rest can quickly get food for 
 their nourishment, but man alone for a long 
 time needs careful feeding, and could not at 
 the beginning have preserved his life. 
 
 Such startling forecasts of our science had 
 Anaximander (said to have been born in the 
 year 611 B.C.), in Miletus, at his time the 
 greatest of Greek cities, a vast market of the 
 seafaring lonians, where the rich valley of 
 the Menander ends at the sea. 
 
 But the tenure of such a dogma as that of 
 Thales concerning primary matter must be 
 slight. Why not some other pervasive ele- 
 ment? With Thales and Anaximander mat- 
 ter held within itself the cause of its own 
 motion. Anaximenes, again of Miletus and 
 after Anaximander and reported his pupil, 
 held air, infinite in extent, nearest to an im- 
 
BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 147 
 
 material thing, before all bodies as their 
 first, animating principle. By a certain con- 
 densation and rarefaction of it arise the 
 things that have come and are coming into 
 existence, and the tilings that will be. This 
 introduction of spatial relations in particles 
 is said to have forecast our modern atomic 
 theory. As our soul which is air holds us to- 
 gether, so breath and air encompass the 
 whole world, he declared. Like Anaximan- 
 der, peering into the dark, penetrated with 
 yearning to see the reasons for phenomena 
 about him, Anaximenes essayed guesses the 
 significance of which astonishes moderns. 
 
 Then came Heraclitus, the wide-eyed, whose 
 proud and solitary mind — ' ' to me one man is 
 ten thousand, if he be the best" — fertilizes 
 to this day. "This world-order, the same for 
 all things, no god nor man made; but it al- 
 ways was, and is, and ever shall be, an ever- 
 living fire lighted according to measure and 
 quenched according to measure." Thought- 
 endowed, primordial fire is the conscious 
 principle of the world, the eternal reason 
 whose harmony constitutes the universal law. 
 From primary substance of purest light or 
 fire — an engendering, and consuming energy 
 
148 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 — in up-building and down-tearing, individ- 
 uals come forth. *'A11 things flow"; "all ob- 
 jects are at all times moving" — modern sci- 
 ence tells of constant, molecular action, and 
 also of ' ' transmutation of elements. ' ' Alter- 
 ation in things as they are, fashioning by- 
 slow development, and adaptation to new con- 
 ditions is the law. 
 
 Opposition unites; ''all things have their 
 birth in strife, and out of discord arises fair- 
 est harmony." Finite things resolve them- 
 selves into the first principle. Human law is 
 nurtured by one fundamental, divine law 
 which is for all time. "God does all things 
 with a view to the harmony of the whole. ' ' 
 
 Because of his use of the word logos, ^opc, 
 word, which meant to the Greeks power of 
 speech and so persuasion, reason, an inter- 
 posing, intermediate agent between man and 
 man, and so between man and God, a medi- 
 ator, an active spiritual (possibly also mate- 
 rial) being to intervene and connect the Eter- 
 nal and the sense-world of man — ^because 
 of Heraclitus' use of logos in describing 
 the world-order, the cosmos — the philosopher 
 has through Christian centuries enjoyed 
 orthodox approval. "They who have lived 
 
BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 149 
 
 in company with tlie Logos are Christians," 
 says Justin Martyr, "even if they were ac- 
 counted atheists. And such among the 
 Greeks were Socrates and Heraclitus." 
 
 Here and now Heraclitus, and the other 
 natural philosophers, restated for their age 
 what the heroic Greek in his religion had 
 centuries before stated for his own — the iden- 
 tity of the universe, faith in its uniformity 
 and in its laws. Religious awe and sense of 
 moral order was with these Greeks in their 
 speculation. 
 
 The plasticity of the early Greek concep- 
 tions had passed. Days when poetry alone 
 should rule were fast passing. Philosophers 
 began as physicists and cosmologists. It was 
 not long before they set out an ethical bear- 
 ing. They gave attributes and functions to 
 the first element they sought which before and 
 afterwards men ascribed to Deity. Orphism 
 was in their midst; their enunciations now 
 and then show Orphic influence. 
 
 By the gifts of many minds a moral code 
 was gradually forming. To meet the growth 
 of his time Heraclitus declared virtue to lie 
 in "following the universal," the subjection 
 of the individual to the law. In the universal 
 
150 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 reason is true freedom. "Not from me, but 
 from truth, it is wise for you to agree that 
 all tilings are one." Character, ethos, ^6o(;, 
 says Heraclitus, is a guardian divinity to a 
 man. 
 
 Thus those early philosophers of the Hel- 
 lenes were teachers. They set out ideas 
 which groped forward and foreran modem 
 theories as to the derivation of the world 
 from primeval nebulse, and also moral con- 
 ceptions still further to evolve and to mature. 
 
 Another of their number, drawn to Crotona 
 perhaps by popular characteristics of a city 
 distinguished for the number of its citizens 
 who had won victory at the Olympic games, 
 and for the excellence of its physicians, 
 Pythagoras settled in southern Italy in the 
 year eircum 529 B. C. A colony of Achaeans 
 had founded the town, and the whole amal- 
 gamated into one body in which the sternness 
 and severity of the Dorian character super- 
 vened. The Dorian conception that there 
 was no health of the people nor of the state 
 without the lordship of ethics, offered ready 
 opportunity for a brotherhood which should 
 aim at "release," ^y<T<c, the purification of 
 the community, the moral salvation of the 
 
BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 151 
 
 people and the establishment of civic order. 
 Such an ethical association Pythagoras 
 founded. With its practical puritan force, 
 its abstinence, its intrepidity, its religious ex- 
 altation, its matriarchal conceptions spring- 
 ing from Orphism and including women in its 
 workers, the union met immediate success. 
 Proselytes took up work for the city's needs 
 — ^man is born into a world of order and is 
 made for, and a part of, order. 
 
 To enter the association the disciple must 
 undergo examination and bind himself to un- 
 conditional submission and obedience. He 
 must subject himself daily to rigorous self- 
 examination as to his temperance, his rever- 
 ence, justice, purity of life, and prayer. Sim- 
 plicity must mark his dress, and of animal 
 food he may partake only in obedience to 
 certain injunctions. His soul dwells in his 
 body as in a prison. Like the stars it is sub- 
 ject to eternal motion and cyclic succession. 
 
 The teaching of Pythagoras that the body 
 is the house or tomb of the soul, his idea of 
 the soul's purification and wandering may 
 have their origin in Orphism. Contrast be- 
 tween earthly suffering and imperfection, and 
 heavenly bliss and consummation, are the 
 
152 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 core of Orphism and Pythagoreanism. In 
 the Greek cities of lower Italy and Sicily 
 Orphic religion united with, or was a part of 
 the blossoming Pythagoreanism in the last 
 of the sixth and first of the fifth century be- 
 fore Christ. But whether Pythagoras found 
 Orphism in Crotona when he reached Italy, 
 and united his teachings with their ways of 
 thinking, or whether the Orphics are indebted 
 to Pythagoras and his followers is not known. 
 "With the practicality of the townspeople's 
 blood he applied philosophy to men's lives 
 and adjusted it to men's relation to the state. 
 He did for the community what Orphism had 
 done for the individual and with the direct- 
 ness and confidence of ethical conviction, 
 
 Pythagoras, Heraclitus said in his own 
 time, was famed for his studies. He may 
 have obtained ideas first hand from Egypt 
 and the East. In the intellectual ferment of 
 that day of the Panjab Luther, Buddha, and 
 other religionists, the old oriental teachings 
 of metempsychosis, the circle of births, may 
 have made its way to his west. It was the 
 age of Cyrus the Great when Indian nations 
 as well as Greek fell under the Persian sway. 
 
 In after centuries the asceticism and mys- 
 
BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 153 
 
 ticism of the Pythagoreans went far. Habit 
 of self-examination among them led to each 
 asking himself at the fall of every night, 
 "How have I sinned?" "What dnty have I 
 left undone 1 ' ' Lacedagmonians of the time of 
 Plato were adepts in Pythagoreanism, and 
 the moral loftiness of the Essenes brother- 
 hood, in times and peoples immediately pre- 
 ceding Christ, possibly refer to Pythagorean- 
 ism absorbed by the Jew when he came in 
 contact with Greek thought. In the Essenes 
 community the Jew carried out the idea with 
 his race's practical, intensive and dramatic 
 fervor. 
 
 Pythagoreanism again in its principle of 
 number and of music, was pronouncedly Do- 
 rian. Number and proportion Pythagoras 
 found in everything that is known. Dis- 
 covery of the principle, in acoustics, of the 
 dependence of the pitch of sound on the 
 length of the vibrating chord led him to such 
 fanciful excesses that he pronounced the prin- 
 ciple of numbers, themselves, the very essence 
 of things, not predicates. The rule of uni- 
 versal law in number he averred is the prin- 
 ciple under which a world subsists in order. 
 
 Still other inroads showed the working of 
 
154 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 the penetrating Greek spirit. The critical 
 thinking of Xenophanes bom (about 580 
 B. C.) at Colophon near Ephesus had its ori- 
 gin in his becoming conscious of this following 
 law. But first let us recall that his brother 
 Greeks, ' ' taught vain luxury by the Lydians, ' ' 
 he said, " go to the market place with haughty 
 looks, wearing purple robes, proud of their 
 comely hair anointed with curious unguents ' ' 
 — the Asiatic Greeks were never so marked 
 with steadfast courage as their cousins of the 
 European Greek countries. The poignant 
 sorrow of Xenophanes when he witnessed the 
 wiping out of the freedom of his brother 
 lonians, and what he deemed their cringing 
 before their victor, Cyrus the Conqueror, led 
 to his conclusion that his people's thinking 
 must be wrong, if they could endure loss of 
 freedom. That is the law: — If they can en- 
 dure loss of freedom, a people's thinking 
 must be wrong. He must instruct. 
 
 Thus at last he came, an aged minstrel, 
 after wide wandering finally to dwell in the 
 Greek city of Elea in southern Italy, affirm- 
 ing against the gods of Olympus of common 
 report, "There is one God, among gods and 
 men greatest, neither in form like mortals. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 155 
 
 nor in mind"; "The "Whole sees, the Whole 
 thinks, the Whole hears. . . . Without labor 
 he rules all things by the purpose of his 
 mind." Xenophanes taught worship of na- 
 ture, an everlasting World God. He would 
 free men's imagination in religion, would re- 
 cast their ideas. 
 
 Among the people was working doubt of 
 the genuineness of the myths. Those gener- 
 ations had out-grown the gods who had satis- 
 fied the world-conceptions of their forebears. 
 "Men imagine gods are bom," further said 
 Xenophanes, "to have clothing and voice and 
 body like our own. " " The Ethiopians make 
 their gods flat-nosed and black, the Thracians 
 red-haired and blue-eyed. " " Oxen, lions and 
 horses, if they had hands to write and do the 
 work of men, would make the semblance of 
 the gods and their bodies, each after his 
 own body. ' ' But Xenophanes still used poly- 
 theistic language. "In the beginning the 
 gods did not show all things to mortals: by 
 searching men find out a better way. ' ' With 
 other Greek philosophers he may have re- 
 garded the popular gods as but one point of 
 view of the World God. 
 
 Originally the making of gods in their own 
 
156 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 image was a gain. It softened the early 
 Greeks who saw the god, one spirit with him- 
 self, in bush and fountain and sky. But 
 crystallization of the idea, led sometimes to 
 petty formalizing of the imagination, and 
 ultimately to loss of mystery and dignity. 
 
 Of the daily conduct of life Xenophanes 
 said, "If one won a victory by swiftness of 
 feet, or in the contest of the five exercises, 
 where the grove of Zeus lies by Pisa's stream 
 in Olympia, or as a wrestler, or in sharp box- 
 ing, or in that severe contest combining 
 both wrestling and boxing, he would be more 
 glorious in the eyes of citizens, and would 
 win a front seat at assemblies and have his 
 food from the public store, and a gift which 
 would be a treasure to him from the city. If 
 he won with horses, he would get all these 
 things, although not deserving them as I de- 
 serve them. Our wisdom is better than the 
 strength of men or of horses. It is not just 
 to prefer strength of body to goodly wisdom. 
 For if among the people were one good at 
 boxing, or in the five exercises, or in wres- 
 tling, or in swiftness . . . not on account of 
 that would the city have good laws obeyed." 
 
 From the imprint of sea-animals and shells 
 
BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 157 
 
 found in Paros, and fish in tlie quarries of 
 Syracuse, this geologist, one of the first, 
 reasoned that the sea had covered the land at 
 one time, when the imprint was made on 
 mud, and had receded through geologic ages. 
 
 To the theological speculations of Xenoph- 
 anes, Parmenides of Elea, his younger con- 
 temporary, succeeded in his theory of the 
 One, Being, knowledge of which, that is truth 
 of which, we can find by thought. "There 
 remains hut one word of the way," said Par- 
 menides, "that Being is. And on this way 
 are many evidences that Being is without 
 birth and without death, that it is universal 
 and alone — existent, without motion and in- 
 finite. Neither ever was it, nor will it be, 
 since it now is all together, one, continuous. 
 For what generation of it wilt thou seek out? 
 How and whence did it increase? That it 
 came from not-being I will not permit thee to 
 say or to tliink. ... So it is necessary that 
 Being either absolutely is or is not." Plu- 
 rality is an empty show and does not exist, 
 but by deception of the senses seems to be 
 triie. 
 
 Parmenides, with Xenophanes and the 
 younger Zeno, induced a spirit of criticism 
 
158 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 upon all thougM that had preceded them. 
 In his cosmogonio speculation Parmenides 
 taught the earth to be a globe, and he elabo- 
 rated the theory of the earth's zones. In 
 that part of his teachings which were phys- 
 ical he voiced the Pythagoreans of whose 
 brotherhood he was an associate. 
 
 In this period the large and rational curios- 
 ity of the Hellene, his vivid, intellectual vigor, 
 his quick perception and agile, imaginative, 
 awe-inspired mind embraced the universe. 
 In asking the question of himself and of the 
 world about him that all enquiring and sift- 
 ing and analytic systems of regarding life 
 ask, he essayed to find his own answer. His 
 philosophers started out with the conception 
 that life is inseparable from matter. They 
 went on from the region of the senses to the 
 region of abstraction till, as we see, in Elea 
 they came to the most abstruse conception of 
 Being. 
 
 The Zeno of Elea referred to, a pupil of 
 Parmenides and called double-tongued, de- 
 veloped in his disputation for the discovery 
 of truth that negative force of the dialectic 
 method, that probing, questioning, mental at- 
 titude, unmasking the pretentious and false, 
 
BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 159 
 
 that was to reach its perfection later in 
 Socrates and to mark Greek thouglit for all 
 time. 
 
 To the Ionian Anaxagoras and his majestic 
 hypothesis in science remained the determin- 
 ing, regnant, world-ordering Mind or nons, 
 vouz, subtlest and finest of things, that which 
 arranges and is the cause of all things, bound- 
 less and self -governed, unmixed with mate- 
 rial nature and subject only to itself — all 
 knowledge, all power, all reason, all order, 
 all simplicity. Our senses are too weak to 
 know the truth. The external world we know 
 by the mind; all things the divine reason 
 knows. The nous of Anaxagoras was dis- 
 tinctively what in later times men called God. 
 "All things were together; then Eeason came 
 and set them in order," said Anaxagoras. 
 The Hebrews told the tale in other words, 
 "And the earth was without form, and void; 
 and darkness was upon the face of the deep: 
 and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of 
 the waters." 
 
 The rigidity and assumed infallibility of 
 the theories of Anaxagoras contrasted 
 sharply with the mental suppleness and plia- 
 bility of others in the Athens of his day. Still 
 
160 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 lie typed tlie investigator, and of Mm Euripi- 
 des is supposed to have sung when he wrote, 
 "Happy the man who is zealous for knowl- 
 edge gained hy enquiry, who hastens himself 
 neither about the woes of citizens, nor toward 
 unjust deeds, but views the order that waxes 
 not old, the order of deathless nature — 
 whence it arose, the how and the why. Near 
 such a man the practice of shameful deeds 
 never sits." 
 
 But speculation upon how and why this 
 world came, its law, its beauty, its woe, had 
 not stopped here. The picturesque Empedo- 
 cles, traveling through Sicily in such milli- 
 nery as purple vestments bound to his form 
 by a golden girdle, his head laureled, his feet 
 sandaled in brazen gear, wonder-working in 
 magic feasts and in awakening a woman from 
 seeming death, acclaimed in religious emotion 
 by the thousands who besought his help, Em- 
 pedocles taught men wineless rites that they 
 might avert old age, and also to fast from 
 evil. "An immortal god unto you, no longer 
 a mortal, I go about honored by all, as is 
 fitting, and crowned with fillets and fresh 
 garlands." And because he led the over- 
 throw of an aristocracy and refused the power 
 
BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 161 
 
 of king, lie was in tlie fiftli century before 
 Christ acclaimed, and in Ms native city of 
 Agrigentum lie is to tMs day worshiped, as 
 an ideal champion of free institutions. 
 
 This advocate of popular rights was also 
 a mystic, teaching the existence of a psychic 
 force, into which discord entering gave forth 
 love and strife, an attractive and repulsive 
 power, the solidarity and repulsion which we 
 see working all about us. There is identity 
 of elements, and one law pervades all nature. 
 "They have no deep-thinking thoughts who 
 think that what was not before comes into 
 being, or that anything dies and perishes 
 utterly." "Everything has the power of 
 thought and a share in understanding." 
 Such deductions as these from kinship with 
 other orders of life led Empedocles to non- 
 flesh-eating and other ascetic practices. 
 "See ye not that ye devour one another in 
 heedlessness of mind!" 
 
 The mightiest and most majestic systems 
 of thought are in progress as is a single 
 human life — the goal of all knowledge, and 
 of all theories of science, and of all specula- 
 tion and wisdom, is only reached stumblingly, 
 by gropings, by false doctrines critically con- 
 
162 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 sidered and improved and perhaps finally 
 gaining the truth. While the warmth of the 
 spirit of the Hellenes increased in individu- 
 ality, their knowledge of a reason for the 
 order that waxes not old, both of deathless 
 nature and the soul of man, their knowledge 
 of an ethical law was growing onward to 
 clearness. Then too they said, as our scien- 
 tists to-day have said, nature by its very 
 uniformity teaches and guides to right action. 
 They sought to find the law of the order and 
 of the right. 
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF LYRIC POETRY: NATIONAL 
 GAMES OF THE HELLENES 
 
 In spirit, as in outward form, the art which 
 the Hellenes developed in this age of indi- 
 vidualism must be the antithesis of the ai't of 
 the heroic time foregone, the simple yet 
 majestic lay. Diligently rounded hexameters 
 of the old art, solemnly intoned by a rhapso- 
 dist, seized upon and swayed the mind of 
 listener into forgetfulness of self. Those 
 older times were not unlike later days of 
 European feudalism when the strength and 
 possessions and even the lordship of the 
 
XEW IMPULSES IN POETRY 163 
 
 baron lay in his conserving tlie old religious 
 and political consciousness of tlie people ; lie 
 nurtured minstrels who sang the days of the 
 Nibelungen, or of Arthur 's knights and court. 
 
 Homer's great epic gave no consciousness 
 of the growth of the every-day man, no note 
 of the every-day man's sorrow, joy, or tri- 
 umph, no expression of that emotion at large 
 among the people. Its soul was aristocratic. 
 Neither in theme nor in art did it recognize 
 the quickening of th« Greek imagination to- 
 ward democratic needs and equalities in life. 
 It was what Dion Chrysostom leads Alexan- 
 der to say centuries later; — "The poetry of 
 Homer is the only poetry I see to be truly 
 noble and splendid and regal, and fit for one 
 who will some day rule men. ' ' It was a seda- 
 tive. By its mere weight of the past, by the 
 grandeur of its flowing stream and its perfect 
 art, it hypnotized the Hellene who came to its 
 recital with sentiments of revolt against the 
 old order in his breast. 
 
 Framed in the resplendent and dramatic 
 setting of a court, or of a festival's recital, 
 the fluent lays pushed to a dwindling distance 
 the Greek's quickening towards his own time 
 and emphasis of his own wants; they wiped 
 
164 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 memories of near-by griefs away, and lulled 
 and soothed a mind overwrought with burdens 
 at hand into a placidity which, in mirroring 
 the poet's ideas, must lose consciousness of 
 its own self-will. As the Hellene listened his 
 sense of a social life approved by his fore- 
 fathers, a life which the gods had loved even 
 to walking and dwelling with men, his inter- 
 est and pride in deeds of the Hellenic spirit, 
 his sympathy and faith, would rise upper- 
 most. 
 
 The dignity and correctness of the moving 
 story appealed to his race imagination. The 
 broad and brilliant pictures it brought be- 
 fore his eyes, grouped and word-painted and 
 harmonized with unsurpassed taste, the hum- 
 ming cadences of the dactyl, the beat of arsis 
 and thesis suggesting steadiness and repose, 
 held him apart from his time. They led him 
 to forget himself, his seething discontents, 
 his growing self-consciousness and urgent 
 self-expression, the literalists who were lead- 
 ing his rebellion. In its art and ritual the 
 overawing, hypnotizing old epic order crushed 
 the growing sentiment of the new man and his 
 beginning of definite thinking. Its lien upon 
 the evolving Greek was not unlike the reten- 
 
NEW IMPULSES IN POETRY 165 
 
 tion the Hebrew scriptures, recited in their 
 synagogues, made later upon the Jews — ex- 
 cept that with the Hebrews the books were 
 kept "holy," apart. It was not unlike what 
 ecclesiastical ritual and hierarchic display 
 make upon democracy to-day. 
 
 An over-bearing conservatism creates an 
 artificial type of life, which can rarely ap- 
 preciate its own artificiality. Greek epos had 
 formalized, had put into permanence, the 
 simple humanizing of nature by the people 
 of its eld and the groupings of men in polity. 
 The ardor of a long hne of poets had formed 
 a supreme art and through its medium an ob- 
 jective religion. Poets had for generations 
 elevated the race's taste. In the old reli- 
 gious forms-, even without a priest, the Hellene 
 had come to have dogmatic utterance. No 
 longer did the dogma satisfy. Its utterance 
 became more and more mediocre. Poets re- 
 fused to smother emotion in the old-time 
 heroics. In art the new impulses of the Hel- 
 lenic spirit must breathe. Poetry that re- 
 flected the feeling of the day, the emotion of 
 their world, was coming to recognition and 
 within the life of the people, and in its on- 
 ward surging was evolving new forms for its 
 
166 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 expression. Now that old political forces 
 were disappearing and tlie individual was 
 substituted for the group, each individual life 
 was acquiring fresh impulse and spontaneous 
 movement, and there was growing individual 
 obligation. And, as we have seen, the new 
 order brought belief of the possibility of in- 
 dividual inspiration in religion itself. 
 
 Urged on by the changes and vicissitudes 
 of the commonweal in its attempted conquest 
 of the present, urged by the bolder spirits 
 and the tenets of his new religion, the less 
 radical Hellene was learning that he too, his 
 lot, his hopes, his fears, were accountable 
 units. He was beginning the frankest liberty 
 o-f speech when circumstances moved his 
 mind. His unreserved personal experiences 
 met sympathy. His sentiments interested his 
 fellows whether he spoke of the pleasure he 
 enjoyed, or the injustice and ills he suffered. 
 Songs were now picturing the people, what 
 they felt, what they thought. Hymns of 
 thanksgiving, hymeneals, funeral dirges and 
 rustic carols of simplest form had been 
 chanted in Greece from time without record. 
 Now they were essaying to interpret the con- 
 tent of the people's vision more completely, 
 
EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 167 
 
 their world, their labor and their love. Po- 
 etry was becoming popular in another sense. 
 Before it had been popular in the meaning 
 that it was beloved by the people and voiced 
 their race sentiment. Now through the evo- 
 lution of lyrics it was becoming popular in the 
 sense that it told individual sentiment and 
 life. The epos was monumental. A folk is 
 not known, however, by the mighty monu- 
 ments of its spirit alone. Its art is found also 
 in minuter and universal products cut by the 
 folk hand and loved by and expressing the 
 folk heart. 
 
 An intense community life, ardent loyalty 
 to the evolving state, now led the inspired 
 singer to political and warlike hymns. His 
 state, that is his city and its adjoining terri- 
 tory, was foremost in the mind of every 
 Greek. It was to him a union which called 
 into being and brought to practice the best 
 powers of even the flimsiest characters. In 
 the painful struggles of the new time the 
 elegy was born, in meter almost twin-sister 
 of the epos. The epic's swing and stateli- 
 ness lay in the elegy's first verse. By reduc- 
 ing the- second line to five feet the singer 
 made the surge of the thought turn about 
 
168 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 upon itself, thus breaking tlie impulse and 
 giving a pause and suggesting reflection — all 
 fair signs of need in the new individualism. 
 The reflection the verse suggested also intro- 
 duced a skepticism which was allied to a dis- 
 integration of the old religious order. De- 
 parture from the established hexameter 
 meant that centuries of the lyric age would 
 soon be speeding. 
 
 The couplet of the elegy fluted, for the 
 word it is claimed first meant a reed flute. 
 Its clear and individual note gave voice to in- 
 terests as varied and broad as prose, then 
 undeveloped, might have done. Bravery and 
 devotion to the state breathed in the war- 
 campaign verse of Tyrtseus, earliest of the 
 Ionian elegists, so-called the lame school- 
 master from Athens, who sang for the Spar- 
 tans with Doric religiosity and veneration 
 for the past, the most famous of his elegies, 
 "Grood and Lawful Order." His marching 
 songs, which were not elegies, expressed the 
 primal instinct of the people for whom he 
 sang, and their feeling of race, of mihtary 
 domination, and, sounding a patriotic clarion 
 to sinking hearts, incited the Spartans by 
 bold advance to regain their old-time lands. 
 
EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 169 
 
 Spartan soldiery when campaigning, after the 
 evening meal and their singing in popular 
 chorus a psean to the gods, vied with one 
 another for a repetition best befitting the 
 force and beauty of these military chants. 
 This may have been between the years 645 
 and 628 before Christ. 
 
 Eeflections upon the condition of life, its 
 politics, its philosophy, appear in the vigor- 
 ous elegies of Solon which mirror his noble 
 life, and in the sententious maxims, replete 
 with human spirit, of other elegists. These, 
 called gnomic because of their detachable 
 sentences reflecting on moral ideas, had en- 
 during force through generations of Hellenes. 
 In later centuries, in the Greek youths' edu- 
 cation they stood side by side with the sem- 
 inal poems of Homer and Hesiod in inbreed- 
 ing seeds of virtue and the conduct of life. 
 "From the noble you will learn what is noble ; 
 if you mix with the base, you will lose what 
 wits you have," wrote Theognis, who taught 
 piety, respect and the moderation of the old 
 reverent fear, aidos. Through these centu- 
 ries the later moral tradition of the race was 
 slowly formed, embodied in verse and handed 
 down from generation to generation — a form 
 
170 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 of growth, of all civilized society. In the old 
 Greek education such ethical precepts, bom 
 of the reflective spirit, of the elegy, were of 
 inestimable value. 
 
 The elegy expressed also, possibly from 
 poets affected by contact with the oriental 
 luxury of the Lydians but intellectually of 
 Greek impress, the light jest and mediocrities 
 of after-dinner clubs, the fleeting joys of 
 youth and hatred of old age, when recital in 
 lighter manner than the epic filled the hour, 
 Singing at banquets was a race-old custom, 
 the banquet itself was of a religious character, 
 and the elegy may have served as a kind of 
 grace. But its reflective break determined 
 the verse more especially for proverb and 
 ultimately for sadness and lament. 
 
 During these changing generations, when 
 appreciation of the new had not fully realized 
 itself, that is, in the passage from the old 
 epic simplicity to subtler conditions, the 
 elegy sang profoundly the cry of the Greek 
 spirit at the instability and uncertainty of 
 human affairs. "Small is the strength of 
 man, ' ' lamented Simonides, a later poet, ' ' un- 
 conquerable his sorrows. Through his brief 
 life grief treads on grief, and death hangs 
 
EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 171 
 
 over him at last." And with true Dorian in- 
 stinct decrying the degrading effects of 
 money, — believing with the Greeks at large 
 wealth a good and desirable thing, but with 
 property must go education, a regard for its 
 use in a wise effective to all — an elegy of 
 Theognis sings, ''We use care in choosing the 
 best race of horses, but a noble man marries 
 a mean-born woman straightway, if she 
 brings with her money, and a woman does not 
 reject a man if he is rich." Thus the elegy 
 came to be one articulation, one outgrowth, in 
 the Hellene's divinely energic genius for ex- 
 pressing the varying moods of the human 
 soul. 
 
 Self-reliance in the affairs of life and of 
 state grew apace. Activity in all the Greek's 
 interests increased. His metrical way had 
 already come to the independent iambic, the 
 darting, shooting meter of raillery and in- 
 vective, mythed as the invention of the maid 
 lambe when she would draw a smile from the 
 sad-hearted mother of Persephone, and de- 
 veloped in the feasts of Demeter at Eleusis 
 on days hcensed for keen and unrestrained 
 jocosity. 
 
 Here again we have the differentiating, 
 
172 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 that adaptation of form to substance, that 
 harmony rooted in the Greek temperament, 
 in which the vigorous, creative taste of the 
 Hellene invariably showed itself. Each new 
 out-springing of their genius was profound 
 and rational. It was also ethical and aes- 
 thetic. Behind it some race need, some dis- 
 tinct cause, had vitalized it into form and 
 distinguished it from its brothers. And each 
 separate expression in his literature, each spe- 
 cial substance of thought and feeling having 
 crystallized its technical form, never outgrew 
 artistic and well-defined limits. The swift 
 beat of the iambic, impetuosity, strength and 
 pungency, marked it for sallies of ridicule 
 and scorn. It was fitted for recitative. 
 
 The poet whose hate-poisoned passion and 
 unbridled invective seized the lilt for festival- 
 day rites and used it with consummate art, 
 was Archilochus, who is said to have written 
 so early as the year 688 before Christ. Con- 
 temporaries of his, and the after world of 
 Hellas, marveled at his fierce personal sa- 
 tire and exuberant caricature. He united the 
 new genius of democracy from his mother, a 
 slave woman, to the old in his father, an 
 Ionian noble, and thus seems to have been 
 
EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 173 
 
 n essential need of his time. His forceful 
 nd original spirit marks the complete break 
 dth the old traditions of poetry. He proved, 
 ven by foul-mouthed charges against the girl 
 e had wanted to marry and her family, that 
 0"w there was a popular sentiment in the re- 
 isation of Ionian life to which the singer 
 ould appeal. When he wrote of throwing 
 way his shield in battle and fleeing for 
 afety, he showed there were people who 
 ^ould justify his deed. In the brisk retort 
 f iambics, also, Solon of Athens defended his 
 ailing statesmanship. 
 
 Elegiac and iambic reached toward the pure 
 S^ric. Lyric expression is more impetuous, 
 lore profound — quite apart from its music 
 nd the poise of its dance. Lyric inspiration, 
 re should note, and the so-called lyric mad- 
 ess, were of the ecstasy of the spreading 
 )rphism, at one with the divine enthusiasm of 
 )ionysus. Indeed the Bacchic hymn in its 
 arly time expressed the Hellene's amaze and 
 worship, his pious joy in stimulating gener- 
 tive processes and glorifying the god in the 
 pringing of the year, his thanksgiving and 
 is lament at the divinity's mysterious decay 
 fter the reaping. 
 
174 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 The spirit of the Hellene could not have 
 become independent in its lyric expression, 
 could not have stood by its own strength, 
 without the development of writing and the 
 diffusion of the art. Communication no 
 longer depended almost wholly on word of 
 mouth transmission. By bringing in the 
 papyrus that grew in the shallows of Egyp- 
 tian waters, Greek trade supplied a ready ma- 
 terial to poetry's support. This aid began 
 about the year 660 before Christ. Upon the 
 papyrus' slender slips a form of poetry, short 
 and easily handed about, might circulate, 
 might enter the intimacies of life and par- 
 take of their spirit. Enjoyment of the lyric, 
 then, would depend no longer on the chanter's 
 word of mouth. Solitary reading would be- 
 come possible and its sequent independent 
 reflection. Knowledge would increase. The 
 scenic epic recital of the rhapsodist would be 
 still more infrequent — even if, in the growth 
 of democracy, courts for its pageantry were 
 becoming fewer. 
 
 In a manner, but, we must remember, 
 under far different social conditions, just as 
 we modems through the evolution of mov- 
 able type developed the novel to universalize 
 
EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 175 
 
 and formalize current phases of life in place 
 of the drama which, when the imagination of 
 man was freed, burst on the world in the 
 days of Elizabeth, so in those old Greek cen- 
 turies, through the coming in of the Egyptian 
 writing-slips, the Hellene might take to him- 
 self a secluded and individual entertainment. 
 Like our novel the lyric was an abettor of 
 democracy. Indeed, from its flexibility and 
 inclusiveness, one might say that it had also 
 kinship with that most catholic servant of 
 the written word, journalism. In ruder sur- 
 roundings than a noble's court, with the 
 simple comradeship of simple friends, or in 
 choral worship of some god', or in solitude, 
 the Hellene might now enjoy his day's com- 
 positions — verses on delicate papyrus tell- 
 ing of his fellows' sentiments and interests. 
 Still the lyric was memorized also. 
 
 And poetry to those old Hellenes was not 
 an affair of the closet, an enjoyment to con- 
 fess with a blush, as with us to-day. Nor 
 were they so distraught by diversity and 
 multiplicity that they had not intension of 
 mind to listen and enjoy. The art in multiple 
 forms was one expression of their energy, 
 and a significant voice of their race. It en- 
 
176 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 tered their life just as tlie beauty of nature 
 entered. It was original in tlie instinct and 
 natural gift of the people. It was largely 
 and intimately theirs. It was their educa- 
 tion and a part of their religion. Through 
 his inspiration the poet stood apart and had 
 a closer communion with divine powers than 
 other men. Poetry was a possession of every 
 Hellene, and had been from those times 
 whose mists conceal their early morning, 
 when doubtless, minstrel or rhapsodist was a 
 scripless tramp. It was continued in the 
 long cultivation of the epos. When th€) 
 muse turned to the people and sang in forms 
 of the melos, it was not wholly to please but 
 to induct to facts of life, to teach in agree- 
 able way the action and feeling and charac- 
 ter of men and women, to give a body to phi- 
 losophy. The poet sang so racial and so hu- 
 man a song, whether for marching soldiers, 
 their victory in battles, their patriotic fervor, 
 or a hymn to a god, a dirge, a wedding-joy 
 or other convivial meeting, that he might 
 celebrate heroes and their commensal gods, 
 or so simple a social member as a grinder 
 of corn or an itinerant vine-trimmer and his 
 fellow-wayfaring swallow of the spring. 
 
EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 177 
 
 The flowering of Greek lyric poetry into 
 perfect self-expression followed, by old-time 
 legend, the stringing of the lyre of foni; 
 strings, which had served for the chanting of 
 the epic lay, to the compass of an octave. 
 This evolution is ascribed to the hand of 
 Terpander of Lesbos and the year 669 be- 
 fore Christ. Terpander not only expanded 
 the lyre, his work incited others to improve 
 the shrill flute, and he also composed music 
 for the religious chant called a nome. "Zeus, 
 first cause of all, leader of all; Zeus, to 
 thee I send this beginning of hymns," is as- 
 cribed to him as the beginning of such a 
 lyric. Music with the Greeks was simple, and 
 used to "sweeten," as they said, the words. 
 
 The outbranching of music evidences the 
 growth of reflective brooding in the Greek 
 spirit. 
 
 Verses breathing individual emotion will 
 not suffer the metes and bounds of inva- 
 riability. Impassioned poetry falls into 
 rhythm, metrical form. It hastens; it rests 
 in the irregular and capricious movement we 
 caU tempo rubato. It sings itself; that is, it 
 demands a voice, a singer. Thus it unites 
 with the music of the lyre. Moreover, the 
 
178 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 singer sympathizing with, the song's meter 
 can not help his body's falling into animated 
 gesture and beating responsive to the meas- 
 ure. He would aid language in the ex- 
 pression of thought. So dance took men's 
 form from every-day walk or slouch to regu- 
 lated and studied movement. Thus elabo- 
 rated, mimetic singing and dancing, which 
 enlist and train ear and voice and eye and 
 foot, grow from the poem of emotion. For 
 the interweaving and exchange of the dance 
 there was to the Hellene religious exaltation 
 — their demiurgus, Eros, in the primeval 
 motion of the choric passages of stars and 
 constellations had set their great prototype.' 
 Of the theme and emotion of Greek lyrics 
 the more elastic and individual belonged to 
 the ^olians. But in Lesbos, home of Coh- 
 ans, the lyric genius of perfect monodic song 
 appeared and dured only so long in that 
 Greek day as the sunlit sparkle and strong 
 discharge of a shower lasts in summer. A 
 surpassing natural beauty crowned their is- 
 
 ° In other religions than the Greek, dances had, and 
 still have no small part. Christian churches were once 
 built to accommodate dancing, of which, it is claimed, 
 bishops were leaders. 
 
EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 179 
 
 land. Vine and shrub and tree of hill and 
 vale, bright blue skies, and warm, circumam- 
 bient seas urged the spirit's intensity and 
 passion. Vehemence and concentration of 
 feeling characterized its folk, especially its 
 oligarchy. They were sensuous, rich from 
 a maritime commerce, luxury-loving from 
 Asiatic influence — ^here in these times of Les- 
 bos must have been an early conflict between 
 oriental and Greek ideas. Perhaps they 
 were familiar with the fancies and abandon 
 of Lydian and Phrygian song and mode. 
 They were generously filled with Greek ardor 
 for beauty. Men and women alike were edu- 
 cated and free. 
 
 Such conditions, their land hemmed in, 
 their evolution not expressing itself in the in- 
 terests of their larger group, the lonians, 
 political unrest and an irresponsible tyran- 
 nus throwing the human soul back upon it- 
 self and penning its impulses — all conditions 
 filled their art and their atmosphere with a 
 special electric force. In brilliant summer 
 skies lightnings sometimes leap from cloud 
 of light to cloud of light. So passionate lyric 
 outburst charged with its genius the human 
 spirit of the island. A new message fulgur- 
 
180 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 ated from tlie soul of its diildren — its de- 
 livery intense and extreme from tlie singer's 
 bursting of old bonds and tbe drenching of 
 the island with beauty. 
 
 In Lesbos the individual found supreme ex- 
 pression; harmonies of sound and form 
 exquisite blending. Sappho's "utterance 
 mingled with fire," her lucidity and simple 
 melody, her sensibility to the loveliness of 
 nature, her flame-like emotion, declare that 
 man had reached his full stature of love. No 
 writer ever wrote down so magically the in- 
 most feeling of the human heart, never so 
 mysteriously crystallized that fire of the soul 
 in human speech.^** 
 
 ^^ Near the middle of our last century Swinburne 
 "wrote of her in her own Sapphic meter: 
 Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion! 
 All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish, 
 Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo; 
 
 Fear was upon them, 
 
 While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not. 
 Ah the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent. 
 None endured the sound of her song for weeping; 
 Laurel by laurel, 
 
 Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead, 
 Eound her woven tresses and ashen temples 
 
EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 181 
 
 Sappho's translucent verse has never 
 palled upon the taste of any succeeding cen- 
 tury, although in succeeding centuries a 
 monkish zeal, distorting in short and narrow 
 vision the meaning of an exquisite product, 
 may have destroyed it in part. Certain in 
 Greece, and later, have blackened the name 
 of this great genius — certain whose prejudice 
 heats and smolders at a woman's overstep- 
 ping the reticence prescribed by social con- 
 vention, others who merely pruriently scan- 
 dalmonger and ail for a name as target for 
 buffooning wit. Sappho was a gentlewoman 
 of Mytilene, married and blessed with a 
 daughter. She received into her house girls 
 to instruct in music and poetry. The best 
 learning of to-day makes clear her true char- 
 acter, and is inclined to echo the awe-struck 
 sentence of Strabo, "Sappho is something 
 marvelous ( Qaunaarbv rt xp^na ) ; in all his- 
 tory you find no woman to compare with her 
 in any degree. ' ' 
 
 Man's full stature of pride bums in odes 
 of Alcagus — the fiery, high-spirited, restless 
 
 White as dead snow, paler than grass in summer, 
 
 Ravaged with kisses, 
 Shone a light of fire as a crown forever. 
 
182 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 tory, hating popular government, rating high 
 his order, resolute even in exile, and finally 
 coming back to Lesbos to accept the clem- 
 ency of Pittacus whom he had vituperated 
 and whom the people had, in despair at civil 
 discord and seeking relief, made tyrannus. 
 
 A place was sanctified the Greeks thought 
 when once visited by the shaft of Zeus. But 
 the shaft, lightning, sterilizes where it 
 strikes. Sterility abode in Lesbos. Poetic 
 brilliance burned to final corruption. Not 
 again did the ^olians give greatly to the 
 spirit of Hellas until in the decline of Greek 
 art and Greek pohty. 
 
 -<S]olian songs were made for a single voice 
 to chant to a flute — to listen to for personal 
 pleasure, to bring grace and charm to the 
 feast: Dorian songs for choruses rhyth- 
 mically dancing as they chanted. Dorian 
 mode and melody, said Aristotle, are ethical ; 
 "Dorian music is the gravest and manliest." 
 Objectivity strongly affected it. This may 
 have come because the Dorians, those aristo- 
 crats of war, in their sternness and severity 
 of the military camp, conscious perhaps that 
 their rigidity and decorum frustrated the 
 working of the muse through the individual 
 
EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 183 
 
 artist, and also possibly having a subtle sense 
 that art of the first order unfolds only in 
 long-established and less politically weighted 
 civilizations, rather patronized than them- 
 selves composed or wrote verse. They had 
 resort to the lonians to interpret themselves 
 to themselves. 
 
 During those earlier generations gifted 
 singers from the old home of song came 
 among the haughty Dorians, and in their 
 sweet, broad, rustic speech, and uttering their 
 tribal simplicity and strength sang for them, 
 and for pay, the notes of the new time — 
 singers who should add glory to their solem- 
 nities and in soaring sweep celebrate their 
 Dorian government, the splendor of Apollo 
 and other gods the Dorians tribally wor- 
 shiped, and the glorious deeds of their 
 heroes. Alcman, so-called a slave from 
 Lydian Sardis, was among the singers. At 
 Sparta, then a renowned city of Hellas, he 
 found a religious people celebrating festivals 
 to Apollo, to Artemis. Also he found men 
 and women taught in gymnastics and music. 
 Maidens he delighted in training in harmony 
 of voice and motion. The new growth music 
 had lately made he joined with the choric 
 
184 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 dance and called upon himself to ' ' sing to the 
 young girls a melodious song in the new 
 fashion." A fragment from one of his 
 graceful parthenia touchingly refers to the 
 old age that now kept him from his wonted 
 driU:— 
 
 No longer, maids of honey voice and yearning tones, 
 Can my limbs bear me. that I were the cerylus! 
 Who skims o'er blossoms of the wave together on the 
 
 wing 
 With king-fishers, a dauntless heart, sea-purple bird of 
 
 spring. ^^ 
 
 ^^ A second fragment of the genius of Alcman is one 
 of the evidences, to which we have referred on pages 
 56 and 77 foregoing, of the appeal to the Hellenes of 
 night and its mysterious solemnity. The fragment tells 
 in exquisite completeness how the sleep of nature roused 
 the Hellene's sentiment. 
 
 Alcman may have composed his verse as he stood 
 under midnight stars in the vale of Lacedaemon, his 
 imagination passing from the peaks of neighboring 
 Taygetus, down through the peopled forests of the 
 mountain sides to the Mediterranean which washes the 
 base: 
 The range's peaks, and their gullied sides, lie wrapt in 
 
 sleep ; 
 The jutting headlands and swoln mountain torrents; 
 Things that creep, all whatsoever the black earth doth 
 
 nourish ; 
 Beasts that haunt the heights; the swarms of bees; 
 
EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 185 
 
 A cadence of harmonized voices united 
 with the stately and semi-dramatic dance, 
 was an essential to the chorus. Such solemn 
 and rhythmic music was at one with the 
 race's prepossessions. It held together the 
 spirit of the people in their all-important re- 
 lation to the state, and it kept their health. 
 It kindled the gods to kindness. Its very 
 being and practice were virtuous recognition 
 of the gods ' powers. 
 
 The Greeks, now congregated in cities, 
 would preserve the old epic religious unity, 
 Knowing the impossibility for the poor or 
 average citizen to give festivals, to have a 
 sanctuary, to sacrifice to the gods, they 
 shared such religious ritual in common. De- 
 light in a common possession led tribe, guild, 
 trades-union, club and even cities to support 
 choruses. Men and women of a community, 
 picked singers and dancers, clad in canonical 
 robes and crowned with the velvet-leafed 
 daphne or other green garland, singing hymns 
 
 Flocks of swift-winged birds; 
 
 And in the deeps of the purple sea huge monsters; 
 
 — All wrapt in sleep. 
 
 Doubtless the Greek poet's lines suggested our mod- 
 ern Goethe's "Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh.' " 
 
186 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 to the flute's accompaniment, wound march- 
 ing through their pellucid air — such a pro- 
 cession the Parthenon's graceful frieze has 
 saved to us. They danced themes, subjects, 
 somewhat as our modern ballet, but then in 
 statelier liturgy of church and city. The end 
 of their pilgrimage was the shrine of some 
 god whom the singers sought to glorify by 
 strophe and antistrophe of choric song and 
 the solemn rhythmic paces of choric dance. 
 
 In this lyric activity every city had its com- 
 poser, the chorodidascalus, who trained the 
 chorus. Contests for excellence were com- 
 mon, and certain families handed down the 
 art, as craftsmen handed their artistry, from 
 father to son. Many types of songs resulted 
 from this race-interest and race-hymn, such 
 as the grave and graceful pgean to Apollo 
 danced in parallel files. Also the dithyramb 
 to Dionysus often tumultuously circling, mi- 
 metic of the mysterious god of inebriety at 
 the vintage festivals. To all festivals, said 
 Plato, "the gods pitying the race of mortals 
 born for sorrow and toil gave the Muses, and 
 Apollo, and Dionysus for comrades." But 
 whatever the nature of the song, whether of 
 sumptuous revelry, of pure nobility, or of 
 
EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 187 
 
 mere elegance, the race's aesthetic instinct 
 ever fitted form and spirit, and developed a 
 complete art product. 
 
 Evolution of the Greek lyric continued 
 when Stesichorus of Sicily whose very name 
 "marshal of the chorus" tells his life, secu- 
 larized the choral lyric and with an almost 
 epic weight sang of heroes. Then also the 
 distinguished genius of Simonides of Ceos 
 composed encomia in more human, more 
 graceful and less intense way upon winners 
 of Olympian victories, and upon others illus- 
 trious for their deed or public life. His ex- 
 quisitely simple and solemn threnody on 
 Leonidas and his band dead at Thermopylae 
 bears out his mellow, human note, and other 
 monumental epigrams show the perfection 
 with which an Ionian expressed Dorian feel- 
 ing and for the first time, or if we count 
 Homer's Iliad, for the second time, uttered 
 the pan-Hellenic victory over the barbarian. 
 Simonides was the first pan-Hellenic lyricist. 
 
 Strophe and antistrophe of the choral 
 lyric, and the rhythmic movement of the 
 choric dance, celebrated also some victor of 
 the Hellenic games at the singing of Pindar. 
 For such winning "the Theban eagle" wound 
 
188 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Lis song through many a labyrinthine myth. 
 "Let us not think," said he, "to praise a 
 place of festival more glorious than Olym- 
 pia." 
 
 Olympic games had their origin, perhaps, 
 in a religious rite, and a seasonal rite pro- 
 motive of fertility, to the great goddess of 
 the early ^gean peoples; with Achaean in- 
 fluence transferring their honors to Zeus, 
 and finally circling the tomb of the tradi- 
 tional Pelops for whom Hercules, son of 
 Zeus, "having fenced about the Altis," said 
 Pindar, "marked off the bounds of it. 
 Therein he set apart the spoils of war for an 
 offering, and made sacrifices and instituted 
 the fifth year feast." The contest, it is 
 claimed, originally determined the victor of a 
 band of young men. He should embody the 
 vigorous spirit and fortune of the folk for 
 the new year coming and drive out the old 
 spent year. 
 
 The highway to Olympia the Hellenes es- 
 teemed a via sacra, and violation of the terri- 
 tory in which the games were held, a sin 
 against the majesty of Zeus. From the 
 slopes neighboring the stadium, forty thou- 
 sand onlookers, it has been computed, might 
 
PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 189 
 
 have watched contestants, who, as they en- 
 tered the stadium, had met in the altar to the 
 athlete god, vital, momentous opportunity, 
 "the chance central of circumstance," xaipoq, 
 promptings triumphantly to ener^xe the de- 
 cisive moment of action, to bring to one su- 
 preme effort all forces of body and will. 
 
 The contest fell at the full of the moon in 
 August or September, in the riant atmos- 
 phere, on the fat plains, and amid the olive 
 groves of Elis. After their full evolution 
 during these centuries of the Hellenes' 
 growth, the Greek world esteemed a victory, 
 when, sang Pindar, "all the warrior company 
 thundered great applause," beyond all 
 other possessions. A wreath of leaves cut 
 with a golden sickle from "the wild olive 
 of the beautiful crown, ' ' and given within the 
 temple of Zeus,^^ a branch of palm, a canoniz- 
 ing in the Altis were the prize of the victor. 
 There was also a soul-animating celebration 
 of himself in choral chants of triumph and 
 prayer and libation to the god. Poets of ex- 
 
 ^^ Perhaps in later years the olive crown was given 
 before the Pheidian gold and ivory statue of Zeus, the 
 sublimity of which antiquity extolled as the highest 
 creation of art. 
 
190 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 alted muse sang Ms achievement and dwelt 
 upon Ms reincarnating the virtues and 
 prowess of old heroes. Triumphant choric 
 chanting of the encomiastic ode at Ms home- 
 coming followed, and was perhaps the vic- 
 tor's chief est glory, for he had seemingly 
 brought undying fame and honor to his 
 city. 
 
 Other games, the Pythian, honoring Phoe- 
 bus Apollo, god of the golden lyre as well 
 as golden bow, spiritualized beyond the phys- 
 ical rigor of the Olympic by their musical 
 contests, that is, by singing to the accom- 
 paniment of flute and cithara, or independent 
 playing of the cithara or flute. At the "seat 
 of the voice of God, ' ' Delphi, the Greeks cele- 
 brated these fine arts once in eight years, 
 and long before they added gymnic struggles 
 and the chariot race. A chaplet of bay 
 leaves picked in the Vale of Tempe was the 
 prize. The Isthmian games in honor of 
 Poseidon at Corinth may have had a regatta 
 in addition to musical competition and ath- 
 letics. Their award was a wreath of dried 
 celery or pine leaves. The game to Nemean 
 Zeus, in the cypress grove of Nemea, like the 
 Isthmian held in the second and fourth year 
 
PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 191 
 
 of each Olympiad, had for its victor a crown 
 of fresh celery.^^ 
 
 Such national, pan-Hellenic games, a form 
 we must remember of the Greeks' humaniz- 
 ing religion, a witness of the spiritual unity 
 of the body-social, evolved especially during 
 these agitated centuries of Greek life, and 
 were in the height of their development in the 
 glorious days immediately to follow. They 
 united the old Hellenic naturalism, physical 
 fitness — a necessity to their life in their fre- 
 quent wars — to the idea of the new, closely 
 knit life and state, that the gods delighted 
 in the spectacle of well-balanced, vigorous 
 bodies developed in the perfection of health 
 and strength. The vitality of Greek athletic 
 festivals lay in this. Virtue and beauty to 
 the Greeks, early and late were the same 
 flower of human life. "There can be no 
 fairer sight," wrote Plato, "than that of a 
 man who unites moral beauty in his soul with 
 
 '•^ "Heavens ! Mardonius, against what sort of men have 
 you led us to fight, men who make games not for the 
 sake of nnoney, but for honor!" the pusillanimous 
 Xerxes is reported by Herodotus to have said to a chief 
 instigator of his expedition, one day between the Per- 
 sian army's action at Thermopylae and the disaster at 
 Salamis. 
 
192 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 an outward beauty of form, the body corre- 
 sponding and harmonizing with the soul be- 
 cause the same great pattern is in both." 
 And Socrates hoped that for Charmides, a 
 youth of beautiful figure, a certain some- 
 thing was not lacking — "a soul as well de- 
 veloped as his body." 
 
 The national game and race worship 
 fraught with rites of joy and gladness 
 focused consciousness growing in art and 
 state, and served as a check to forces decen- 
 tralizing Greek life. They had a strength 
 and an importance we can not with our times' 
 outlook readily conceive. Unlike modern na- 
 tional and international athletics they were 
 neither "professional," fads for the inept or 
 rudimentary brain nor for the unco rich, nor 
 booms for money-mad speculators. They 
 were rooted, while the Hellene preserved his 
 Hellenism, in race evolution, in ancestral re- 
 ligion, in his character-loving autonomy and 
 its equilibrium. In the days of free Hellas 
 their spirit was fundamental and sound. 
 
 Meeting places of the great games, es- 
 pecially Olympia and Delphi, grew to be 
 museums of art, holy cities, treasure-stores 
 of splendid statues, marble and gold and 
 
PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 193 
 
 ivory, and of temples of the gods, deposi- 
 tories of tlie race's history and of human 
 knowledge. 
 
 Within the sacred confines of the games 
 quick-witted Greek met nimhle-witted Greek. 
 Whether he went as a private citizen or one 
 of an official embassy representing some 
 western city in Greek Sicily or a community 
 of Hellenes in Asia, he went not as a sight- 
 seer merely, nor even as a revisitor to an an- 
 cient home of his race, but as a pilgrim pene- 
 trated with reverence for his race 's legends of 
 Zeus, Avith religious awe of the Far-Darter, 
 with devotion to Hercules of the Unconquer- 
 able Hands. He came to know other opinions 
 than his own locality's, his tribe's, and to 
 realize anew the unity of his race. Friction 
 with his kind kindled afresh fires of common 
 brotherhood. He exchanged with another 
 usage and ways. He gathered ideas for later 
 thought. 
 
 It is not possible to sketch what his vivid 
 and intellectual life won from these meeting 
 centers for his race. On his way to the 
 games, and homeward again, he companioned 
 hardy Greek seamen and traders as their 
 swift, black ship cut the waiters of the Mid- 
 
194 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 land Sea toward Olympia or Delphi, or Cor- 
 inth. He fell in association not only with 
 brother Hellene, but with foreign folk. Cun- 
 ning Asiatic vendors, and, doubtless, ad- 
 venturous Egyptians, he traveled cheek by 
 jowl with and met in public houses where he 
 sought rest and cheer. At selling booth he 
 saw foreign handiwork. The stimulus his 
 sane and sympathetic travel brought the 
 Greek — the Hellene never laying aside his 
 race-consciousness and race-legend — the gain 
 by fraternizing with another from an op- 
 posite quarter, some remote city of the Greek 
 world, or from another race, were of unac- 
 countable importance. 
 
 Thus the games developed the Greeks' gen- 
 eral knowledge and conserved their religious 
 and political tradition. They stimulated the 
 poet in preparing an aroused and sympa- 
 thetic audience for his ode. They impelled 
 the architect and sculptor to perfecting 
 statue and pillar and altar and temple. 
 They incited the craftsman of golden ewers, 
 censers, chariots. They urged the breeding 
 of horses. On all sides they promoted sense 
 of beauty and art. In the opportunity they 
 gave rich men to pay for the equipping of 
 
PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 195 
 
 legations and training of clioruses, they 
 opened tlie purse of those possibly without 
 any other merit for civic distinction, and 
 warmed the occasion to their praise. By no 
 way could wealth gain influence and popular- 
 ity among the Hellenes so genuinely as 
 by augmenting their national festivals and 
 training chorus and actors for religious rites. 
 The odes which the glory of these national 
 games inspired in the singer were not merely 
 setting out the victory of the citizen. The 
 splendor of the contest and the far-reaching 
 renown of the winner stimulated the poet to 
 review the religious cult, to retell old race 
 myths, to retrace their political bearing, and 
 to show them in a new brilliance. He might 
 parallel the living victor with an old race 
 hero, might trace likeness between the doer 
 of far-off days and the competitor of that 
 present day and thus idealize the living man. 
 Pindar's odes of victory which the Greeks 
 esteemed the best form of their national 
 song, are the still sonorous voices of those 
 pulsing centers of Hellenic life, the national 
 games. The odes tell the religious awe of 
 the poet to which the choric singers and 
 dancers gave interpretation. 
 
196 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 The Doric choral seems to have been the 
 organ note of the old Hellenes. Apart from 
 its association with our religious rites our 
 modern organ has a generic quality, imper- 
 sonality, a voicing in its pulsing notes of 
 united souls rather than the aspiration oi; 
 desolation or joy of a single being. Its rotund 
 sonority and massive harmonies ; its reflective 
 expression of joy, its seriousness, its gravity, 
 its aching melancholy, its triumphant energy 
 and victory and religious peace, may pos- 
 sibly utter the human soul for us of to-day 
 as the choral of the Dorian genius voiced 
 emotions of the Hellenes. 
 
 Greek lyric poetry was no less a great ex- 
 pression of the genius of the Greek people 
 than the epic, we have said. In this age of 
 evolving individualism in which we have 
 glimpsed the lyric's evolution, the poet, as in 
 the epic age, was priest and prophet to his 
 people, a giver of religious and ethical 
 maxims. "With the gnomic poet this holds 
 true, and also witli those later. "The hopes 
 of men are tossed up and down. Let a man 
 remember that his raiment is worn on mortal 
 limbs," wrote the majestic Pindar. "Things 
 of a day ! What are we ? What are we not 1 
 
PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 197 
 
 Man is a shadow and a dream. ' ' The imagi- 
 native force and sustained utterance of this 
 great lyricist emphasized Doric religious 
 consciousness and Orphic teachings. Pindar 
 alone of the lyric poets seems to have sung 
 that the soul is immortal, divine, and finally 
 through purgation receives endless felicity. 
 
 The lyric was at its height when Sparta, 
 preeminently the city of choric singing was 
 leader in Greece. When the choral song was 
 transplanted to Athens varying religious con- 
 ceptions and a different tribal and social 
 life diminished its popularity. Among the 
 Dorians centuries of athletic drill and mil- 
 itary tactics had given them delight in 
 rhytlimic movement. Women, we have seen 
 in Alcman's verse, as well as men were 
 trained in the art. At Athens, although girls 
 hymned to Pallas as they marched through 
 the roadway and climbed the marble stairs of 
 the Acropolis, yet they were more cut off 
 from free and active life, and their grace 
 and charm could not inspire such poetic ardor 
 as Alcman's at Sparta. Then also at Athens 
 the choral hymn to Dionysus was ripening 
 into the drama. 
 
 Older forms of Greek music were stately 
 
198 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 and simple. The poet composed Ms own 
 music, which reflected his art, and he trained 
 the chorus sympathetically to sing and dance 
 his composition. He was the mouthpiece of 
 ethical and racial feeling. But later than 
 this time, as generations passed, the early 
 choral subhmity, its pure melody united with 
 definite ethical thought became too difficult 
 for disciples of the new education. Degener- 
 ation in imagination led to florid and affected 
 and flaccid styles. Music gained supremacy 
 over words, and the lyricist became a verse- 
 writer who took orders for his composition 
 from the musician. Earlier lyrics were con- 
 temned. Neglected, they were forgotten. 
 Pride of race and of family would save such 
 poems as Pindar's victory odes. Others 
 would be subject to the caprice of minstrels 
 and only preserved for some passages of 
 special appeal. Lyric composition from its 
 nature abides less easily in the memory than 
 epic lays. With the loss or abandonment of 
 ethical character and simplicity in the music 
 went disregard for the verse. And thus the 
 world lost noble poems. 
 
 Modes of fashion in music never change, 
 said Plato, without the greatest laws of the 
 
PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 199 
 
 state changing. The later divisions of Hellas 
 affected the Hellenes' national festivals. As- 
 semblies degenerated. Great odes of victory 
 died out. And finally the elegiac current of 
 time, flowing through the stretches of plain, 
 or barren sand, or dark forest of later cen- 
 turies, brought down few petals of the 
 splendid roses of Lesbos that Sappho sang, 
 and only broken stems of the barbed nettles 
 of Archilochus — these and a few other re- 
 mains ; and these mainly because teachers of 
 rhetoric for ends of illustration encased ex- 
 cerpts in treatises — ^writings whose dry im- 
 perviousness to flood and color neutral to re- 
 ligious zeal saved the genuine utterance of 
 the human spirit embedded in them. 
 
FIFTY YEARS OF DISTIN- 
 GUISHED WORKS 
 
Progress is, in fact, the same thing' as the continued 
 production of new ideas, and we can only discover the 
 law of this production by examining sequences of ideas 
 when they are frequent and of considerable length. — 
 Sir Henry James Sumnee Maine, in Early History 
 of Institutions, 
 
 Whatever be the nature and value of that bundle of 
 influences which we call Progress, nothing can be more 
 certain than that, when a society is once touched by it, 
 it spreads like a contagion. Yet, so far as our knowl- 
 edge extends, there was only one society in which it 
 was endemic. ... To one small people ... it was 
 given to create the principle of Progress. . . . That 
 people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of 
 Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek 
 in its origin. A ferment spreading from that source 
 has vitalized all the great progressive races of mankind. 
 — Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, in The Effects 
 of Observation of India on Modern European Thought. 
 
 Dear city of men without master or lord. 
 Fair fortress and fostress of sons bom free, 
 "Who stand in her sight and in thine, sun, 
 Slaves of no man, subjects of none; 
 A wonder enthroned on the hills and sea, 
 A maiden crowned with a fourfold glory 
 That none from the pride of her head may rend, 
 Violet and olive-leaf purple and hoary, 
 Song-wreath and story the fairest of fame, 
 Flowers that the winter can blast not or bend; 
 A light upon earth as the sun's own flame, 
 A name as his name, 
 Athens, a praise without end. 
 
 Swinburne, in Erechtheus. 
 202 
 
FIFTY YEARS OF DISTIN- 
 GUISHED WORKS 
 
 A DEFENSIVE WAR: DEMOCRACY IN ATHENS 
 
 With the Hellenes the inevitable law, grad- 
 ual transformation through minute, continual 
 change, had been working for centuries. 
 Still no satisfactory solution of the ethical 
 questions of life had they found at any point 
 within the individualistic period of their de- 
 velopment. The selfish energy of the age 
 was too great. A sense of the worth of our 
 moral nature had not been wanting.. But 
 there was needed a purifying of spirit, an 
 ordeal, an enthusiasm or a woe, to clarify the 
 people's ideas before the supreme blossom of 
 the Greek spirit could imfold its unrivaled 
 splendor to the world. An evolution doubt- 
 less more rapid than at any other time among 
 any other people was pending. 
 
 Unity the Greeks had — in their language 
 and its treasured poems, in common religious 
 faiths, in festivals of clan and city, and in 
 
 203 
 
204 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 national games. ' ' Greece is of one blood, and 
 of one speech.," Herodotus reports the Athe- 
 nians reminding Spartan envoys, "and lias 
 dwelling places of the gods in common, and 
 sacrifices and habits and kindred customs." 
 The Hellenes' diversity lay in their political 
 life, in an intense individualistic segregation 
 of the various polities of cities and small 
 states. Their diversity had been disuniting, 
 for instance, the lonians of the Asiatic coast. 
 Years before these people bad revolted 
 against the Persian ruler and his satraps 
 whose conquering empire already extended, 
 wrote Herodotus, from regions of insupport- 
 able heat to insupportable cold. 
 
 Among these Asiatic lonians, with their in- 
 stinct for autonomy there went a suspicious 
 fidelity, distrust of one another's good faith, 
 and sequent lukewarm spirit of cooperation 
 against the Persian; an incapacity to submit 
 themselves to discipline, which was an ill-form 
 of their Greek individualism; and an impa- 
 tience of steady and persevering toil, which 
 companioned tbeir semi-orientalization. 
 Add to this bavoc-working condition the 
 personal jealousies of expelled and pervert 
 Hellenes, the fact that no one of the Asiatic 
 
A UNIFYING ENTHUSIASM 205 
 
 Greek states possessed the material power, 
 united witli energy and ability, to constitute 
 itself uncontroverted leader, and we see how 
 the Persians' lust for empire subjected those 
 islanders. Then, too, terror-stricken at the 
 horrors the Persians visited upon conquered 
 peoples and lands, the Greeks of Asia pur- 
 posely lessened resistance. Their Hellenic 
 kin on the European mainland, especially the 
 youQg democrats of Athens, were not blind to 
 the miseries of the Ionian cities and islands 
 of Asia, and the cruelties put upon them by 
 the subjugating and exterminating powers of 
 Persia. The fellow-feeling of the Athenians 
 with their colony and allies, Miletus, for in- 
 stance, was profound, and when the poet 
 Phrynichus made that city's conquest the 
 subject of a tragedy, their sensibilities, al- 
 though moved to tears at the theater, meas- 
 ured a thousand drachmas as the right fine 
 for his temerity in "representing to them 
 their own misfortunes." 
 
 The enthusiasm which was to unite and 
 definitely to establish the civic life of Euro- 
 pean Hellas was not long delayed. Hosts 
 collected in Persian Asia and poured down 
 upon the devoted Hellenes. Xerxes, the Per- 
 
206 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 sian autocrat, had inlierited tlie idea of 
 the invasion of European Greece. But he 
 lacked the intense wrath against Athens that 
 had stimulated his father Darius, and his ex- 
 pedition he might never have undertaken had 
 not courtiers unceasingly urged him to the 
 conquest — ^not only Persian courtiers but also 
 treacherous Greeks banished from their 
 home-city for some cause, haunting the pal- 
 ace at Susa, and looking to a restoration of 
 their power under a Persian satrapy. 
 
 Probably never before or since, in any re- 
 corded history, for one end, under one com- 
 mand, has there assembled a body so great 
 and so diverse and alien as the Persian now 
 led by his personal and despotic will across 
 the Hellespont bridge of boats — seven days 
 and nights it is reported the host was cross- 
 ing — and towards the slender land of Hellas 
 and its children of light. 
 
 Athens and Sparta sought to organize 
 against the barbarian hordes. They united 
 in convening at the Isthmus of Corinth a con- 
 gress representative of every city-state of 
 Hellenic race and speech. They entreated 
 the broadly scattered Hellenes to come to- 
 gether in trust and brotherhood for the one 
 
A UNIFYING ENTHUSIASM 207 
 
 purpose needed by the whole Hellenic family 
 — defense of Hellas, preservation of their 
 race-blood as well as of race-spirit. 
 
 This general federation, with Sparta as 
 presiding power, sent defenders to stem the 
 Persian onflow. Their stand was at Thermop- 
 ylffi. How those men discharged their duty 
 in that narrow pass has been for every cen- 
 tury since a sublime ensample of patriotic 
 devotion. Not alone the band of Spartans 
 and Thespians, every Hellene not in exile or 
 medizing sutfered an equal pitch of resolu- 
 tion. The famed victories of Salamis and 
 Platsea and Mycale followed. 
 
 Those contests were fateful days and the 
 sole hope of not only the then Hellenes, but 
 of the heirs of Hellas in the ages to come of a 
 nobly human civilization. To the victors of 
 that day, forcing back orientalism and its in- 
 vasion of Europe, our civilization owes op- 
 portunities to-day. The Asian autocrat had 
 found the Hellenes equal to the reputation 
 Artabanus had given them, "They are a peo- 
 ple," he had warned his nephew, "said to be 
 the best both by land and sea." 
 
 When we realize the development of G-reece 
 in the one hundred years following these 
 
208 ' THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 events, and the mighty gift of her spirit to 
 all later times, we stand appalled at what 
 the destinies of mankind would doubtless 
 have been had the Persian hordes precipi- 
 tated themselves on the Hellenes before their 
 unity was accomplished. It might have hap- 
 pened. Twenty years before a sultana of 
 Darius and the mother of Xerxes, Atossa, at 
 the instigation of a homesick Greek surgeon 
 captive at the court of Susa, had urged such 
 an attack. 
 
 Of products of Greek liberty the Persians 
 themselves must for more than a generation, 
 have been conscious. In the expedition of 
 Darius against the Scythians many years be- 
 fore (that is, about 515 before Christ), the 
 Hellenes had effected all operations calling 
 for intelligence. For instance, the Greek 
 architect, Mandrocles of Samos, bridged with 
 boats the Hellespont, and the lonians of the 
 islands and the Asiatic coast had united to 
 put a span over the Danube, then esteemed, 
 says Herodotus, the greatest of rivers. 
 
 So necessary to give complete realization 
 to the national spirit was this struggle the 
 people now undertook, that its issuance at 
 this juncture seems providential. To the 
 
A UKIFYING ENTHUSIASM 209 
 
 Greek generations that followed it was a re- 
 ligions drama setting ont the profoundest 
 sentiments of the Hellenes. It expressed an 
 ethical sense attributed also to the Persians ; 
 "God permits no one to have high thoughts 
 but himself," an old uncle had cautioned 
 Xerxes.^ In his drama of "The Persians" 
 ^■Eschylus leads the ghost of Darius to utter a 
 kindred sentiment, "When anyone, himself, 
 hastens to ruin, God abets him. ' ' __ 
 
 In resistance to the Persian the Greek be- 
 came conscious of his own superiority — con- 
 scious of his freedom and his thought which 
 were the ground of his superiority. Persia 
 was in externals more civilized than Greece. 
 Luxury was better understood at Susa than 
 at Athens, and industries were more diversi- 
 fied in the enormous cities of old Assyria and 
 of Egypt than in Hellas. But the mind of 
 Persia was stationary: the spirit of Hellas 
 progressive. Nowhere save in Greece had 
 men learned to think, and to depend upon 
 their own spirit for guidance. This lesson 
 the Hellenes had been getting by heart 
 
 ^ In this, and also in other speeches of Persians 
 quoted from Herodotus, the sentiment is, probably, 
 Greek. 
 
210 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 through the foregoing centuries of struggling 
 individualism. The great war in which their 
 skill in military combination and orderly 
 courage triumphed over unorganized, inef- 
 ficient force and the imbecile self -acclamation 
 and fatuous confidence of Persia, wrote it be- 
 fore their eyes in sun-clear truth. 
 
 When her people had pushed back the bar- 
 barians ' chaotic force Greece came out 
 brighter and stronger than before. The iron 
 of her spirit had been heated. She had been 
 in the furnace and forge of a defensive war. 
 She had needed to be molded by such blows 
 as only the formidable empire of the Persians 
 could give before she could stand to later 
 peoples the invincible, self-conscious em- 
 bodiment of her Pallas Athene. She had 
 come to the highest plane of national life. 
 She was conscious of carrying and sustain- 
 ing the spirit of her race. She had made 
 evident that the difference between Hellene 
 and barbarian was the difference between 
 free culture and routine, liberty and slavery, 
 progress and stagnation, humanity with its 
 instrument of reason and daemonism. 
 
 A successful carrying through of a great 
 military movement actively stimulate s the 
 
DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 211 
 
 political sentiment and the consciousness of 
 citizenship, and leads to demand for fuller 
 and completer political dignity. Athens had 
 been the life and soul of the Greeks' resist- 
 ance to Persian invasion headed by Datis ten 
 years before the inroad of Xerxes. At that 
 time the combat and victory at Marathon of 
 her "embattled farmers," citizen-democrats, 
 single-handed save for their brethren from 
 Platsea, had given surpassing example of the 
 stoutness of heart and the clarity of head her 
 institutions engendered. 
 
 Thus during these wars and so at their 
 end, Athens came forth with startling bril- 
 liance. She had made evident that she had 
 the vigor, self-confidence and aggressive ac- 
 tivity to execute what her spirit had thought 
 out, that she was filled with ardor and pa- 
 tient of labor. "We ourselves know the 
 power of the Persian is many times greater 
 than ours," said the Athenians before the 
 battle of PlatiEa to a medizing Thessalian 
 king, an envoy of the Persians; "It is not 
 necessary to insult us with that. Neverthe- 
 less we so cling to freedom that we shall use 
 , what strength we have. Do not try to per- 
 suade us to come to terms with the barba- 
 
212 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 rian. We never sliall. Tell him the Athe- 
 nians say that as long as the sun goes in the 
 path in which it now moves, they will never 
 come to terms with Xerxes. Bring us no 
 such proposition again. Think not to succor 
 us by persuading us to unrighteousness." 
 Like all Greek states Athens was small, 
 and each citizen fulfilled his duties directly 
 in person, not by deputy. For a quarter of 
 a century before Thermopylae constitutional 
 democracy had prevailed. Under it the 
 Athenian character had developed marvel- 
 'ously. Self-government had become habit- 
 ual. The people had learned to determine 
 for themselves, and to accept the decision of 
 |the majority. They were active. They were 
 daring. They had patient endurance. They 
 'had energy to work — that high energy that 
 jComes from consciousness of real greatness. 
 :They had the matchless discipline that works 
 give. Their organizing energy had increased 
 stheir power of resistance. The spirit of even 
 ■the poorest had caught the glow of political 
 equality, the pride of the service of public 
 life, the ideal of the city-state that shone be- 
 fore the Hellenes for generations, long be- 
 fore Plato constructed his perfect state — the 
 
DEMOCEATIC SENTIMENT 213 
 
 faith that he, the man of simple life, also was 
 a contributing part to the beauty and sym- 
 metry, Attica was now one and indivisible. 
 
 But how were atfairs moving in that 
 cluster of villages that formed the heart of 
 Laconia in the middle valley of the Eurotas ? 
 — in "lovely Lacedaemon?" Sparta's long- 
 settled constitution, her rigid Dorian life and 
 discipline, and her organized "war-men" had 
 in the past given her an ascendency and the 
 presidency of the pan-Hellenic union. More 
 than ten years before the Persian snuffing- 
 out at Platsea and Mycale, when the people 
 of ^gina gave earth and water to heralds of 
 Darius in token of their submission, the 
 Athenians preferred complaint at Sparta that 
 the ^ginetans had been guilty of treason to 
 Hellas. ' ' For the general benefit of Hellas, ' ' 
 therefore, Sparta dealt with the ^ginetans. 
 These deeds first manifested Hellas as an ag- 
 gregate body. 
 
 But now flagrant misconduct of Spartan 
 power brought into clear light Athens' ef- 
 ficient command and preeminence. A power- 
 ful and voluntary movement proclaimed her 
 leader at sea. This had its spring in a sense 
 of justice. Still it meant that a schism had 
 
214 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 cleft the national polity, but little before 
 shining with great evidence to the eyes of 
 all men. The divided spirit Athens and 
 Sparta embodied now divided the Greek 
 world. In every city-state political divisions 
 between the oligarchic and democratic fac- 
 tion lay, that is, in sympathies with the 
 energetic democracy of Athens, whose as- 
 cendency was awakening the jealousy of the 
 conservative allies of Sparta, or in support 
 of conservative, home-keeping traditions of 
 Sparta allied with the Peloponnesian states 
 and landsmen and with native oligarchs in- 
 imical to organized union of states. The 
 struggle was between oligarchic and demo- 
 cratic faction within the town, we said. 
 Whatever their affiliation, there remained 
 the belief, instinctive in the mind of Hellenes, 
 that in every city-state autonomy was neces- 
 sary to free citizens. 
 
 Maritime states freely and spontaneously 
 gravitated toward radical Athens, aggressive, 
 energetic, keeping to steady effort, organiz- 
 ing the navy supplied for expelling the bar- 
 barians from the ^gean, collecting taxes 
 levied for their common security, enforcing 
 loyalty to a great pan-Hellenic purpose, mak- 
 
DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 215 
 
 ing confederacy against tlie Persians an ef- 
 ficient working reality. For the new Hellas 
 Athens was virtually leader. Her very geog- 
 raphy had destined her for the most perfect 
 of the city-states. In gifts of the spirit she 
 had focused the many-sidedness of Greek 
 life and embodied its unity. 
 
 Athens was now become the citadel, "the 
 asty of Hellas," as Isocrates later called her. 
 Her name meant Hellas. Within herself her 
 children were illustrating the economic law 
 of the most vigorous social systems — of the 
 individual, he having the highest possible de- 
 velopment of his own personality, subordinat- 
 ing himself to the interest of the social 
 whole. 
 
 Athens found her headship complete when, 
 attracted by her success, new allies sought 
 her leadership, and the common funds of the 
 League of Delos were transferred from the 
 island of Delos to the acropolis of Athens. 
 The form of her dominion was a protectorate, 
 the preservation of which seemed to be one 
 with her own life. By force of circumstances 
 she had become head of a compact which 
 bound each individual state and, by their 
 good-will and agreement, mistress of an irre- 
 
216 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 sistible navy. An empire tlirougli gradual 
 and unforeseen stages was tlirnst upon 
 her. 
 
 With security and peace the idea of de- 
 velopment burgeoned in Attica. Its fruits 
 should be political right and order which 
 their Solon of earlier centuries had sought. 
 In spite of political control by landed 
 families, the idea, we have said, had been in 
 Athens, the idea of a democracy, self-govern- 
 ing and responsible to itself — a democracy in- 
 creased by wealth from growth of industry 
 and commerce and the wants of a prospering 
 taiddle class; also by a large body of navy 
 coming to the fore, for "wooden walls," 
 ships manned chiefly by marines of lower 
 orders, had saved Athens at the battle of 
 Salamis. 
 
 Free male Athenians who had reached the 
 age of manhood formed the Assembly meet- 
 ing, three or four times a month, in the open 
 air, on a hillside, the Pnyx, and with charac- 
 teristic Athenian religiosity opening its sit- 
 tings with prayer. The prerogative of the 
 body was supreme power in all most impor- 
 tant matters of state. A council of Five Hun- 
 dred managed details of the business, and es- 
 
DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 217 
 
 pecially they considered and sanctioned every 
 law proposed to the Assembly.^ 
 
 New life and new sense of responsibility 
 and power also developed among the poorer 
 people by the establishment of a jury, which 
 judged of law as well as of fact^ — paid 
 courts often panels of five hundred men each. 
 The Council of the Areopagus before this had 
 been a court of special importance and bril- 
 liance, its members elected for life. It was 
 doubtless a continuation of the old Homeric 
 council of elders, and had a semi-religious 
 weight, carrying in itself admonitory and 
 censorial powers over the whole people, and 
 possessed of a moral influence that outweighs 
 the opinion of a mere court of justice. The 
 prestige of this senate of the Areopagus, 
 Pericles and his associates, in the radical 
 movement now going on in 463-2 before 
 
 2 This rule preserves a relic of Solon's check to the 
 democracy he expanded against the oligarchs, namely, 
 that selected men should first approve every proposal 
 brought before the yearly meeting of citizens. Pay for 
 attendance at the sovereign Athenian Assembly did not 
 begin till later, when an allotment of three obols a day 
 attracted the poor and unemployed. 
 
 * Sometimes, in eminent modem opinion, confound- 
 ing law ^nd fact, 
 
218 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Christ, distinctly lessened. The new juries 
 almost stripped the conrt of judicial power. 
 Such an act alone meant a minimizing of the 
 conservative and aristocratic influence. In 
 these times also choice by lot was established 
 for archonship and election to the Council of 
 Five Hundred, and every citizen had the 
 chance of holding political office. 
 
 Heretofore the active life of the Athenian 
 men had been mainly in military affairs. 
 Now it was in civic functions. The jury 
 courts of perpetual session were a consum- 
 mation of the democratic sentiment. The 
 number of the jury, the impossibility of fore- 
 knowing who would sit in a cause, and the 
 secret vote defended its members from cor- 
 ruption and fear. Each citizen member must 
 have become thirty years old; therefore they 
 were mature in judgment. 
 
 These courts were solemn from sheer 
 numerical force. They stimulated to, and 
 also gained from, the just, measured balan- 
 cing to which the Hellenic mind was especially 
 sensitive. They roused thought and con- 
 sciousness of the dignity of citizenship. 
 Their weakening effect was that, absorbing 
 his time in discussion and judging, they neces- 
 
DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 219 
 
 sitated the giving over by the qualified 
 Athenian of business duties to the excluded 
 slaves, freemen and foreigners. In these 
 higher aims for the elect, there must have 
 grown a contempt for trade or wealth-getting, 
 and for whatever occupation might so ab- 
 sorb a man that he had not ample leisure for 
 the corporate activities of the state — a con- 
 tempt, finally, after several decades, .elabo- 
 rating into the dilettant spirit we find in 
 Hellas — ^when Hellas was no longer Hellas. 
 
 These juries had in their hands the super- 
 intendence and competence of affairs of the 
 Athenian empire. Cities that paid tribute to 
 the confederacy — one thousand, Aristophanes 
 says, but the tribute lists give fewer — looked 
 to Athens for arbitration between members, 
 for regulation of state with state, for trial 
 of grave causes and for enforcement of 
 justice and obligations of the confederacy. 
 From Athens' presidency of the union and 
 the empowering of her to enforce her de- 
 cisions, there gradually grew in her a judicial 
 authority which contributed greatly to the 
 prestige of the Athenian empire. 
 
 Two hundred years and more before these 
 times, in the first outburst of the age called 
 
220 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 lyric, we have noted how rising emotion of 
 the individual and his self-expression went 
 with the introduction of papyrus, a record 
 easily got for personal utterance. Again 
 popular media developed power of self-ex- 
 pression. In these jury courts procedure 
 was by word of mouth. The simplest citizen 
 should he able to plead his own cause, to 
 carry the thread of discourse, to reason with 
 brevity, to color his advocacy with ethical 
 sentiment. Oratory, that strange magic art 
 of persuasion, of directing by argument the 
 convictions and wills of one's fellow citizens, 
 always in its uses an associate of free govern- 
 ment — oratory sprang forward. Ehetoric 
 became a preparation for real life. 
 
 With the Hellenes ' quickness to fit means to 
 ends these juries led to professional speech 
 writers, that is, to writers of speeches for 
 litigants, and uniting with the dialectic de- 
 velopment in philosophy, to rhetors and 
 sophists. With such popular courts were not 
 only associated Grreek oratory and its allied 
 didactic rhetoric and grammar, but from 
 them ethical philosophy and political had 
 great stimulus. Moreover, they served to in- 
 
DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 221 
 
 crease the respect embedded in the Athenian 
 character for judicial formalities. 
 
 Law the Greeks had venerated from the 
 early time of a Lycurgus in Sparta and a So- 
 lon in Athens, when its creator was believed 
 to be inspired. This sentiment of theirs had 
 increased in the foregoing centuries of evolv- 
 ing individualism.* In the time of Pericles, 
 when the state was a brotherhood of equal 
 men, spontaneously the Athenians looked for 
 protection to constitutional forms. Laws 
 had life, individuality, speaking personality. 
 During the prevalence of the old education 
 they were not abstractions, not barren prin- 
 ciples so remote from every-day life as to be 
 written down and forgotten. In one phase 
 they were even intimacies of the social life, 
 set to music and chanted after dinner. In 
 another, they were the voice of impartial 
 reason, august, moral existences dwelling in 
 the midst of the people, united with whom 
 was good life, freedom. They were per- 
 suasive associates, familiars, who attempted 
 to bring and keep among men an ideal justice, 
 as the embodied laws that speak in awe- 
 
 * This we have seen on foregoing page 96, 
 
222 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 inspiring sentence to Socrates in Plato's 
 "Crito." Laws created the institutions of 
 his state most sacred to the Hellene. Their 
 collective voice was what fellow citizens com- 
 manded. "Service to the law is service to 
 the gods," said Plato. 
 
 When faith in the laws' relationship with 
 an ideal, divine justice failed, when the indi- 
 vidual no longer circumscrihed his will to the 
 clarified and systematized will of his fellow- 
 citizens, the institutions they had protected 
 tottered. But still, even at the end of Grreek 
 freedom, Demosthenes vigorously taught the 
 Athenians that the law was a part of them- 
 selves and representative of the character of 
 all who belong to the state, and they "belong- 
 ing to themselves" ought to live in accord 
 with it. To do this was freedom. 
 
 But now, at this time, Pericles, President 
 of the evolving Athenian democracy, met op- 
 position in a body of conservatives. The re- 
 served nature of the radical leader prompted 
 him to look not to extension of empire, but 
 rather to the ordering and beautifying of that 
 already given. Against his effort to direct 
 democratic zeal, the "honorable and respect- 
 
DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 223 
 
 able" body of conservatives, the anti-demo- 
 cratic body, contended that upbuilding and 
 beautifying of Athens by money of the 
 confederacy was malversation, that the fund 
 should be spent in active war against the 
 barbarians. 
 
 Sensitive to the genius of his day, Pericles 
 answered that the city had already, by the 
 year 466, cleared Europe and the ^gean of 
 the Persian, the end for which the tax was 
 given, that now Athens might rightfully 
 spend a part of the fund in enlarging and 
 strengthening her walls, magazines and 
 docks, in clothing herself in a majesty fitting 
 her as the center of Hellenic feeling, the 
 leader of Hellenic intellect and will, and in 
 delighting her own people and strangers 
 flocking to behold the surpassing beauty of 
 her musical and poetic festivals and the 
 matchless art of her temples. Such work as 
 Athens had undertaken was properly pan- 
 Hellenic, the statesman claimed with irresist- 
 ible eloquence. A population engaged in 
 Athens' adornment — ^miners, marble-cutters, 
 masons, carpenters, ivory cutters, goldsmiths, 
 painters, road-makers, tool-makers and mend- 
 
224 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 ers, carters, sailors, the body supplying daily 
 needs of these, — all must have upheld this 
 most regal argument. 
 
 "We ourselves assembled here to-day," 
 spoke Pericles in his speech upon those fallen 
 in the first year of the Peloponnesian war 
 (431), "we assembled here to-day, who are 
 still most of us in the vigor of life, have cari 
 ried the work of improvement further, and 
 have richly endowed our city with all things, 
 so that she is sufficient for herself both in 
 peace and war. Of the military exploits by 
 which our various possessions were acquired, 
 or of the energy with which we or our fathers 
 drove back the tide of war, Hellenic or Bar- 
 barian, I will not speak ; for the tale would be 
 long and is familiar to you. . . . 
 
 "Our form of government does not enter 
 into rivalry with the institutions of others. 
 We do not copy our neighbors, but are an ex- 
 ample to them. It is true that we are called 
 a democracy, for the administration is in the 
 hands of the many and not of the few. But 
 while the law secures equal justice to all 
 alike in their private disputes, the claim of 
 excellence is also recognised; and when a 
 citizen is in any way distinguished, he is pre- 
 
PKRICLES' ESTIMATE OF ATHENIANS 225 
 
 ferred to the public service, not as a matter 
 of privilege, but as the reward of merit. 
 Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may bene- 
 fit his country whatever be the obscurity of 
 his condition. There is no exelusiveness in 
 our public life, and in our private intercourse 
 we are not suspicious of one another, nor 
 angry with our neighbor if he does what he 
 likes; we do not put on sour looks at him 
 which, though harmless, are not pleasant. 
 While we are thus unconstrained in our 
 private intercourse, a spirit of reverence per- 
 vades our public acts ; we are prevented from 
 doing wrong by respect for the authorities 
 and for the laws, having an especial regard 
 to those which are ordained for the protec- 
 tion of the injured as well as to those un- 
 written laws which bring upon the trans- 
 gressor of them the reprobation of the gen- 
 eral sentiment. 
 
 "And we have not forgotten to provide for 
 our weary spirits many relaxations from 
 toil; we have regular games and sacrifices 
 throughout the year; our homes are beauti- 
 ful and elegant; and the delight which we 
 daily feel in all these things helps to banish 
 melancholy. Because of the greatness of our 
 
226 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 city the fruits of the whole earth flow in 
 upon us ; so that we enjoy the goods of other 
 countries as freely as of our own. . . . 
 
 ' ' We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple 
 in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind with- 
 out loss of manliness. Wealth we employ, 
 not for talk and ostentation, but when there 
 is a real use for it. To avow poverty with us 
 is no disgrace; the true disgrace is in doing 
 nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen 
 does not neglect the state because he takes 
 care of his own household; and even those 
 of us who are engaged in business have a 
 very fair idea of polities. We alone regard 
 a man who takes no interest in public affairs, 
 not as a harmless, but as a useless character; 
 and if few of us are originators, , we are all 
 sound judges of a policy. The great impedi- 
 ment to action is, in our opinion, not discus- 
 sion, but the want of that knowledge which 
 is gained by discussion preparatory to action. 
 For we have a peculiar power of thinking be- 
 fore we act and of acting too, whereas other 
 men are courageous from ignorance but hesi- 
 tate upon reflection. And they are surely to 
 be esteemed the bravest spirits who, having 
 the clearest sense both of the pains and 
 
RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 227 
 
 pleasures of life, do not on that account 
 shrink from danger. In doing good, again, 
 we are unlike others ; we make our friends by- 
 conferring, not by receiving favors. ... To 
 sum up: I say that Athens is the school of 
 Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in 
 his own person seems to have the power of 
 adapting himself to the most varied forms 
 of action with the utmost versatility and 
 grace. This is no passing and idle word, but 
 truth and fact; and the assertion is verified 
 by the position to which these qualities have 
 raised the state. ' ' ^ 
 
 ARCHITECTURE ADORNING ATHENS: SCULP- 
 TURE AND ALLIED ARTS 
 
 Arts never equaled in any other fifty years 
 of human history marked the half of a cen- 
 tury between two fateful wars. A noble 
 grace, long evolving, matured in the compar- 
 ative quietude Greece enjoyed, and impelled 
 a most rich and wonderful architectural cre- 
 ation. Now through the unity, energy and 
 excelling strength of the people and times', - 
 
 ° The passage is quoted from Jowett's translation of 
 Thueydides by permission of the Delegates of the Ox- 
 ford University Press. 
 
228 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Athens came to embody in concrete expres- 
 sion, for many centuries and even to this day, 
 great, formative ideas. 
 
 The independent conceptions resting on a 
 common race basis had already given to the 
 Hellenic system of building the styles called 
 Doric and Ionic. Eelevancy of means to 
 ends, severe logic, marked the Doric order. 
 In the Doric column, austere, simple, un- 
 adorned and with no separate foot, repress- 
 ive of expression of self, supporting a boldly 
 projecting capital, is traced the Doric idea 
 of the merging of the individual in the mass. 
 It was the form which evolving from the ' 
 Doric nature, showed how each should con- 
 tribute to the support of the community. 
 Wholly and entirely each belonged to and 
 must be judged in relation to his value to the 
 state. Standing by itself the column tells 
 the onlooker to expect more than in itself it 
 presents. That is, the spirit of the column 
 is for the whole — ^its own inner sternly self- 
 centered force expressing security, repress- 
 ing individual wishes and aspiration, stunts 
 its height which is only five and one-half 
 times its diameter — all to support the great 
 and glorious unit of its architrave, frieze and 
 
RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 229 
 
 the rhytlimic adornment completed in tlie 
 pediment or gable. 
 
 The graceful Ionic column, on the other 
 hand, animated, free in play of fancy, de- 
 manding and standing on its own base, whose 
 beauty is complete within itself, spending its 
 strength in slender shoots upwards and in 
 airy decoration, is eight and one-half to nine 
 and one-half times its greatest dianneter. 
 Its spirit of individual expression inserts a 
 cushion of carved stone between the column 
 and the weight it supports, molds the 
 cushion which must soften the weight, and 
 seizes upon the flower of the honeysuckle, 
 upon leaves of the forest and other lines of 
 grace and delight to the eye to deck its indi- 
 viduality in rich variety. 
 
 These two systems, the Doric and Ionic, 
 the age of Pericles blended in the perfect 
 form of the Attic. Subject to Doric influ- 
 ences the Ionic column became less slender. 
 Its capital took on energy in its swelling 
 volutes, and the mass resting on the column 
 more simplicity and emphasis. These modi- 
 fications conveyed the feeling of strength in 
 the column and sense of the supereminent 
 mass. Exquisite proportion, chaste ele- 
 
230 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 gance, richness of decoration yet reserved 
 before luxury, piquancy and mere attractive- 
 ness, mark it. 
 
 Under the influence of Athenian political 
 freedom art had become pan-Hellenic, and 
 artists might unite the aesthetic genius of the 
 ^gean Ionian, rich, florid, complex, sensi- 
 tive, and the disciplined order and zeal of 
 the Achaean Dorian. This development in 
 the world of art is one of many evidences 
 that the G-reek race was in its perfectness 
 an amalgamation of northern and southern 
 elements — ^.that it possessed the artistic 
 genius of the southern ^geans, and the in- 
 stinct and genius filled with a passion for 
 religion and government of northern, Ger- 
 manic peoples. 
 
 It is the age of Pheidias, the matchless 
 sculptor and foreman of public art works at 
 Athens, of the master architects, Ictinus, Cal- 
 licrates and their fellow workers, all con- 
 sciously glorifying the unity of Greece in the 
 gracte and splendor of temples, and embody- 
 ing in statues the Hellene's idea of the di- 
 vine. In Athens rose the Theseum, standing 
 in purity of line to-day and reported built 
 in that day to the mythical champion of 
 
RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 231 
 
 Athenian democracy, Theseus, an entomb- 
 ment for his bones and vesting within itself 
 the privilege of sanctuary to those who were 
 poor and oppressed by cruel usage. The 
 colonnaded Propyltea or Foregate of the 
 Acropolis also arose; the stately Erectheum 
 to protect venerated insignia of an antique, 
 religious legend which connected the snake 
 with underworld power and fertility charm; 
 and the elegant temple of the Wingless Vic- 
 tory. The main body of these temples 
 gleamed with the rich luster of marble, but 
 painting and gilding adorned the upper 
 parts. 
 
 The form of the Parthenon, to the cult of 
 Athene Parthenos, tells that the rehgious 
 base of the spirit that built it was Doric 
 Puritanism — throughout Hellas, in fact, 
 Doric forms prevailed as the religious man- 
 ner. Entrance to the Parthenon's full per- 
 fection led through that Foregate*, or Propy- 
 laea, which united in its fortress-like court 
 Ionic ornament and cheer for festivals with 
 Doric seriousness and strength for defense. 
 In choosing the Doric form for the Par- 
 thenon, the subtle sense of the Hellenes for the 
 perfect expression of a spirit merely em- 
 
232 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 bodied a law set forth, by all later history, 
 namely, that the puritan spirit of a nation is 
 that upon which the nation is upbuilt and 
 round which it centers : in whatever degree 
 that spirit is minimized or nihilized, in so 
 far the national life suffers — perhaps be- 
 cause that spirit demands for itself simplic; 
 ity, devotion, setting aside of self and trivial- 
 ities for the commonwealth, and keeping 
 down pride and hollow, deadening ritual that 
 vaunt themselves. 
 
 The beauty of these temples of the Acrop- 
 olis of Athens, it should be noted, was built 
 upon a thoroughly scientific foundation and 
 knowledge of stone construction. Even 
 more: — In their analysis and differentiation 
 of parts, the builders used various devices 
 to heighten their art that our duller sense 
 of ^to-day only knows through study of their 
 works. The neighboring Mount Pentelicus, 
 pushing its peaked summit into Attic clouds, 
 offered quarries of marble and afforded 
 architect and sculptor abundant supply of 
 raw material for re-creation into perfect 
 form. 
 
 What titanic strides the Athenians were 
 taking! In these years of labor they built 
 
RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 233 
 
 the Parthenon, beginning the work in 447 be- 
 fore Christ, and carrying it structurally so 
 far that by the year 438 they dedicated the 
 gold aoid ivory statue of The Virgin, that is, 
 Athene. What manifestation of their so- 
 cial life the building gives ! Upon what con- 
 ceptions of civic distinction they reared it, 
 that marble hymn to victorious Wisdom, 
 and at last carried on their worship within 
 its walls! To realize it consider again the 
 state of the world about this handful of 
 A-ryan folk embodying for the first time ideas 
 of an organized, law-governed, democratic 
 state, and the lucid intelligence of man as 
 its tutelary goddess. Nomadic, unorganized 
 peoples over the mountain cap to the north, 
 groups not unlike westward beyond the coast 
 of the Ionian sea, and gross orientalism 
 among the hordes within the Persian empire 
 to the east, and south in the Egyptian sa-. 
 trapy. But in the center of the then known 
 world these Hellenes, people of light, them- 
 selves evolving and advancing the idea of 
 distinction, a state formed of free individuals 
 and governed by those who formed it, desir- 
 iij£ beauty expressed in perfect proportions 
 as they desired the perfection of Ihe people's 
 
234 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 civic life. This is the story the building of 
 the Parthenon tells. Religion and demo- 
 cratic zeal have rarely so united to warm the 
 heart of a people. 
 
 Heights of devotion chiseled the Par- 
 thenon's perfection. And in return, in the 
 great and indefinable action and reaction of 
 race and race-work and the individual, to 
 what inspiration did it hold its people! To 
 the service of the whole body of citizens — 
 not in the individual's dwelling and his os- 
 tentatious luxury, but in temple and other 
 public buildings. Their directing divinity, 
 the spirit of clear-eyed Thought, Eeason, Ee- 
 flection, Athene, foster-mother of heroes 
 after the old matrilineal fashion, giver of 
 arts of war and of peace, fertility blesser of 
 the Athenian in granting the nourishing olive 
 and their praiseworthy climate, genetrix of 
 their beloved city, Pheidias had visualized by 
 a statue standing forty-seven feet high in the 
 sanctuary of the Parthenon. The flesh parts 
 of this most noble presentation were Pheid- 
 ian-carved ivory and the draperies of Pheid- 
 ian-carved gold. A golden sphinx-mounted 
 helmet covered the erected and stately head 
 of the statue,- lance and shield stood on the 
 
RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 235 
 
 ground near by in sign of peace, and from 
 her hand a statue of Victory six feet in 
 height, her wings outstretched, held forward 
 a golden wreath-^for in this sanctuary vic- 
 tors in the pan-Athenian games received 
 their prizes. The image featured the peo- 
 ple's piety and consciousness that their 
 own intelligence and religious emotion had 
 evolved the idea it represented, and had 
 prompted the great sculptor's ideal. 
 
 The Hellenes' clear and fertile imagi- 
 nation humanized, as we have seen, their con- 
 ceptions of the divine force underlying all 
 phenomena. Grod took on human form in 
 early times. Sculpture with the Hellenes 
 began its life far back in pre-Greek days,, in 
 the images it made to suggest or feature con- 
 ceptions of the gods.- The art was doubtless 
 a chief medium for expressing race feeling 
 and race solution of the passage of man — the 
 never-dying questioning, whence came he? — 
 how wrought he here? — whither went he I 
 Its outworking grew gradually. It reflected 
 mental distortion at times doubtless, and 
 monstrous creations penetrating its centuries 
 of growth. The sculptor was struggling for 
 mastery of the idea and of his material. He 
 
236 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 was also failing in his technic. Images at- 
 tributed to a traditional sculptor, Dsedalus, 
 have rigid and conventional forms. From 
 such, budding the art flowered in these years 
 of The Great Peace. 
 
 In their desire for beauty of form, their 
 flexible, free development of and reverence 
 for the body, the Hellenes apotheosized the 
 body's merits. Greek dress of the classic 
 age, its simphcity, its clinging to the body 
 and portraying shape and movement, in- 
 creased their sense of beauty of expression. 
 The body's movements and attitudes deline- 
 ated its spiritual life. This ancient folk not 
 only had not found necessary a depicting 
 perturbing emotion, the soul's shame of the 
 body and poignant writings of the soul upon 
 the face; to their aesthetics such excess was 
 distasteful, false to art canon. Thus their 
 art kept equilibrium. Mind and body, soul 
 and material, worked together in. union for 
 the product. 
 
 Through this proportion, this balance be- 
 tween soul and body, this check of self -limi- 
 tation so that neither exuberance of senti- 
 ment nor pressure of reason should break 
 poise, the Hellene's genius most naturally 
 
RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 237 
 
 conceived art in plastic expression. And in 
 types. Distinct, unvarying, traditional ideals 
 ■wMctL possessed the imagination, impelled 
 the great G-reek art. The unchanging, an as- 
 similation of the generic forms of life, gave 
 these Hellenes' sculpture stabiHty and raised 
 it above ephemeral fancy and caprice to 
 noble ideals. This was true not only of their 
 sculpture but of all Greek art. Not the ac- 
 cidental, such as the artist might meet in 
 every-day life — not such individualizations; 
 but rather the united consent and cooper- 
 ation of Greek souls of the group, the truly 
 Hellenic, the universalized and majestic gods 
 and heroes of an earlier day, each having a 
 compacted power of his own, each identified 
 with his own ethical function, each a com- 
 ponent of emotions and thoughts and char- 
 acter, each portraying a composite type — 
 "the image," as Dion Chrysostom said, 
 "agreeing with all the epithets of the god." ® 
 
 ^ A face suffused witli such thought and emotion as 
 we assign to an ideally cultivated woman or man we 
 gain in a composition-photograph of two or three hun- 
 dred educated men or women. Not wholly unlike this 
 photograph Greek sculpture made visible a universalized 
 image of the greater gods. 
 
238 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 / Just as their sculpture doubtless had birth 
 in their religion, that is, the first subjects 
 modeled by primitive artists symbolized a 
 god, so in ideal images of the immortals the 
 religion of the Greeks found solemn and 
 sublime expression. The people's gratitude 
 for the victory over the Persians and their 
 warring glory Pheidias expressed in another 
 significant work. His bronze statue of 
 Athene Foremost in Battle, made of booty 
 from the battle of Marathon, rose seventy 
 feet in the "dazzling aether" of the city 
 "violet-crowned, glorious." The Pheidian 
 Athene embodied the type of the goddess 
 of the old, matrilineal age, we have said, 
 when, Plato declares, "the business of war 
 had been the common concern of men and 
 women," a goddess who demanded that the 
 hero she had chosen to protect and inspire 
 should do great deeds. Statues of these 
 years alone set out that high companion- 
 ship. Types of later workers than the Pheid- 
 ian school, such as the Aphrodite of Praxite- 
 les, are apt to embody ideas of the goddesses 
 when, says a writer of to-day, they had be- 
 come abject and amorous and sequestered 
 to domestic servility. 
 
RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 239 
 
 A masterpiece of the preeminent Pheidias, 
 the majesty and splendor of the seated Zeus 
 at the common sanctuary of Hellas, Olympia, 
 a statue embodying ethical conceptions of 
 Power, Omniscience, Benevolence, many wit- 
 nesses declared perfect. "The majesty of 
 the work," said Quintilian, "was equal to 
 the god." While Pheidias was fixing for- 
 ever the type of Athene and Zeus, in Argos 
 Polyclitus made a gold and ivory statue of 
 Here, spouse of Zeus, "treading in golden 
 sandals," typifying grace and beauty of 
 women of the matrilineal system, reflecting 
 that life and a most perfect physical form. 
 All productions of this age have upon them 
 the unmistakable impress of its spirit. 
 
 Before these times of the elevation of 
 Athens, of the art reflective of its political 
 life and exigencies, before these peoples' de- 
 light in the ideal representation of their 
 great divinities and great deeds, families and 
 schools of brass-founders and workers in 
 gold and ivory had carried on their crafts 
 in Argos, in Sparta and elsewhere. Now, 
 Athens led to the complete development of 
 facility and mastership in such arts. 
 
 The city also attracted painters who com- 
 
240 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 panioned sculptors in interpreting race life. 
 To glorify the works of her democracy she 
 called Polygnotus, in 462, from Delphi, where 
 he had painted the walls of a hall illustrating 
 large scenes from Homer, such for instance 
 as the descent of Odysseus into Hades. In 
 Athens, and agreeably to current veneration, 
 he and his fellow-workers pictured the bat- 
 tle of Marathon within a compartment of the 
 public portico called the Poecile Stoa, a 
 cloistered walk adorned besides with paint- 
 ings such as scenes from the fall of Troy, 
 and with statues, a haunt, in that sociable 
 out-door life, of philosophers, nimble-witted 
 rhetoricians and loungers eager for discus- 
 sion, eager, too, for the last and best thing 
 said. 
 
 In vases of the Hellenes, thousands of 
 which remain to us to-day, and in the com- 
 monest utensils for the household, we have 
 the Greek sense of form, in simple, dignified 
 painting recalling, with ever-present, ever- 
 significant motive, some god or hero. 
 
 THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR: ITS RESULTS 
 
 Mutations in the progression of the Greek 
 spirit were of unexampled rapidity. Horror 
 
PARTY SPIRIT AND FRATRICIDAL WAR 241 
 
 at the threatened defeat of their spirit by 
 Persia originally united the Hellenes, and 
 tore out the law that peoples capable of 
 hearty consolidation emerge to power and 
 dominion. The ultrarational clinging to 
 race feeling, that spirit of loyalty to race in- 
 stinct which had started back in those cen- 
 turies when personality had not become iso- 
 lated and the individual felt and thought 
 through the group, t^iat profound social senti- 
 ment transcending local patriotism which 
 subordinates all self-interest to the progress 
 of the whole, led these Greeks to unite in 
 their individualism. 
 
 The dualism we have spoken of in fore- 
 going pages — ^Athens at the head of mari- 
 time powers, Sparta leading the Pelopon- 
 nesian confederacy welded into one against 
 Persia — had elements of friendliness. But 
 when the conqueror was conquered, when 
 fear of extinction by Asian inroad had died 
 out, civil dissension followed. That per- 
 sistent germ of disunion, the inability to 
 unite except when threatened with extinc- 
 tion, a Greek characteristic due in part to 
 the geography of small island and tiny 
 valley, was now multiform. * ' Hellas is one, ' ' 
 
242 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 said a Greek poet, "but its city-states many." 
 "Fifty years passed between the retreat 
 of Xerxes and the beginning of the war," 
 testifies the eye-witness Thncydides, who 
 called the Peloponnesian conflict the great- 
 est event that had happened within the mem- 
 ory of man. Jealousy, fear of the power of 
 democratic Athens, continues Thncydides, 
 seeing most of Hellas already subject to her, 
 impelled to the hostilities. The Spartans 
 felt that the Athenians were growing too 
 strong to be ignored. Their determination 
 to curb the strength of their compeer was not 
 long looking for an excuse. They found it 
 in a disturbance of the balance of power. 
 
 "War is great folly," Pericles told the 
 Athenians, "for those who are in prosperity 
 and free to choose. But if they must either 
 yield straightway to their neighbor, or ven- 
 ture and win, then he who shuns the danger 
 is more blameworthy than he who stands 
 his ground." The Athenians stood their 
 ground, and intertribal feuds stained Greek 
 lands. "Civil war is as much worse than a 
 foreign war," wrote Herodotus, himself far 
 from the conflict, "as war itself is worse 
 than peace." 
 
PARTY SPIRIT AND FRATRICIDAL WAR 243 
 
 War prevailed, and when Attic soil-dwell- 
 ers, driven by their enemies' invasion, 
 crowded the city for protection, a material 
 plague clasped hands with spiritual defeat. 
 Pericles, the man of supreme character, died. 
 Corrupt leaders succeeded him. Years 
 passed and war went on. The Athenians, 
 distraught, restlessly endeavoring after re- 
 lief through constitutional changes and polit- 
 ical experiment, were coming to attach them- 
 selves to men — men looldng to personal ad- 
 vantage — ^more than to principles. 
 
 Even in the face of freedom in Athens 
 social inequality had persisted. Democratic 
 institutions had not effaced sentiment at- 
 tached to families in the line of old popu- 
 lar heroes, for instance that of Alcibiades of 
 the family of Ajax — ^never wholly discredited 
 sentiment toward the old, supporting, influ- 
 ential life of inheritance and its wealth ac- 
 cumulating under the traditions of an acquis- 
 itive, conservative stewardship. Anti-popu- 
 lar combination and conspiracy had dwelt 
 underworld throughout the democratic life 
 of Athens, and now through breaking of 
 hopes and through corruption gained ascend- 
 ency. 
 
244 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 "The whole Hellenic world was in com- 
 motion, ' ' says Thucydides in Ms history ; " in 
 every city the chiefs of the democracy and of 
 the oligarchy were struggling, the one to 
 bring in the Athenians, the other the Lace- 
 daemonians. Now in time of peace, men 
 would have had no excuse for introducing 
 either, and no desire to do so; but, when 
 they were at war, the introduction of a 
 foreign alliance on one side or the other to 
 the hurt of their enemies and the advantage 
 of themselves was easily effected by the dis- 
 satisfied party. And revolution brought 
 upon the cities of Hellas many terrible ca- 
 lamities, such as have been and always will 
 be while human nature remains the same, 
 but which are more or less aggravated and 
 differ in character with every new combi- 
 nation of circumstances. In peace and pros- 
 perity both states and individuals are actu- 
 ated by higher motives, because they do not 
 fall under the dominion of imperious neces- 
 sities; but war, which takes away the com- 
 fortable provision of daily life, is a hard 
 master and tends to assimilate men's char- 
 acters to their conditions. 
 
 "When troubles had once begun in the 
 
PARTY SPIRIT AND FRATRICIDAL WAR 245 
 
 cities, those who followed carried the revo- 
 lutionary spirit further and further, and de- 
 termined to outdo the report of all who had 
 preceded them by the ingenuity of their en- 
 terprises and the atrocity of their revenges. 
 The meaning of words had no longer the 
 same relation to things, hut was changed by 
 them as they thought proper. Eeckless dar- 
 ing was held to be loyal courage; prudent 
 delay Tras the excuse of a coward; moder- 
 ation was the disguise of unmanly weakness ; 
 to know everything was to do nothing. 
 Frantic energy was the true quality of a 
 man. . . . The lover of violence was always 
 trusted, and his opponent suspected. He 
 who succeeded in a plot was deemed know- 
 ing, but a still greater master in craft was he 
 who detected one. On the other hand, he 
 who plotted from the first to have nothing 
 to do with plots was a breaker up of parties 
 and a poltroon who was afraid of the 
 enemy. . . . The tie of party was stronger 
 than the tie of blood, because a partisan was 
 more ready to dare without asking why. 
 (For party associations are not based upon 
 any established law, nor do they seek the 
 public good; they are formed in defiance of 
 
246 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 the laws and from self-interest.) The seal 
 of good-faith was not divine law, but fellow- 
 ship in crime. ... 
 
 ' ' The cause of all these evils was the love of 
 power, originating in avarice and ambition, 
 and the party-spirit which is engendered by 
 them when men are fairly embarked in a 
 contest. For the leaders on either side used 
 specious names, the one party professing to 
 uphold the constitutional equality of the 
 many, the other the wisdom of an aristoc- 
 racy, while they made the public interests, 
 to which in name they were devoted, in real- 
 ity their prize. Striving in every way to 
 overcome each other, they committed the 
 most monstrous crimes. . , . Either by the 
 help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping 
 power with the strong hand, they were eager 
 to satiate the impatience of party-spirit. 
 Neither faction cared for religion, but any 
 fair pretence which succeeded in effecting 
 some odious purpose was greatly lauded. 
 And the citizens who were of neither party 
 fell a prey to both ; either they were disliked 
 because they held aloof, or men were jealous 
 of their surviving. ... 
 
 "The simplicity which is so large an ele- 
 
PARTY SPIRIT AND FRATRICIDAL WAR 247 
 
 ment in a noble nature was laughed to scorn 
 and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious 
 antagonism everywhere prevailed. . . . Each 
 man was strong only in the conviction that 
 nothing was secure ; he must look to his own 
 safety, and could not afford to trust others. 
 Inferior intellects generally succeeded best. 
 For, aware of their own deficiencies, and 
 fearing the capacity of their opponents, for 
 whom they were no match in powers of 
 speech, and whose subtle wits were likely to 
 anticipate them in contriving evil, they 
 struck boldly and at once. ' ' ^ 
 
 In the war each contestant over-estimated 
 chance of success when success befell his 
 state. Each lost measure between means 
 and ends. Headlong desire for reprisal 
 drove each destructively. After Athens met 
 terrible reverses in Sicily, reverses so red- 
 dened with excesses that like the massacre of 
 St. Bartholomew, like the religious persecu- 
 tions of the Thirty Years' War in Germany, 
 they have become one of the horrors of his- 
 tory, insinuating suggestions from Susa en- 
 
 ^ The passage is quoted from Jowett's translation of 
 Thucydides by permission of the Delegates of the Ox- 
 ford University Press, 
 
248 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 deavored, by detaching Greek towns from 
 their support, to break the Athenian empire. 
 "In the civil wars Persian intrigne was 
 busy," says Thucydides. Intrigue won, and 
 Spartans allied themselves with Persia to 
 carry joint war against Athens and her allies. 
 
 Athenian heroism persisted in endeavor to 
 retain some fragment of her empire. This 
 forlorn hope failed, and at last every city in 
 alliance with, or dependent upon Athens sub- 
 mitted to the supremacy of Sparta. Yet not 
 Sparta, but rather union of Sparta with 
 Persia had destroyed the political leadership 
 of Athens, and borne out another law ; — that 
 races too little sympathetic to form powerful 
 unions fall to subservience — the very op- 
 posite of that law exemplified when the Hel- 
 lenes ninety years before united against 
 Persia. 
 
 The repose of exhaustion followed the 
 Peloponnesian war. Whether the city of 
 Athens was to dominate all Hellas in a Grreek 
 empire which had formed for her on the rise 
 of the Athenian navy, or whether she were to 
 be a mere republic of rank kindred to other 
 Hellenic states had been tried out. An asser- 
 tion of Herodotus, who died in the sixth year 
 
HISTORIANS - 249 
 
 of the war, suggests reflection upon its prog- 
 ress and result. The Athenians, says the old 
 historian, were of Pelasgic origin, that is, they 
 were predominantly of the early, industrious, 
 art-loving, peace-loving peoples; the Lace- 
 dsemonians, Doric, that is northern, war and 
 dominion-loving. 
 
 IMPERISHABLE HISTORIES OF HERODOTUS 
 AND THUCYDIDES 
 
 But before and during these eventful dec- 
 ades, in this capital 
 
 " Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts, 
 And eloquence, native to famous wits," 
 
 inspiration to flower and fructify stopped 
 neither in architecture and its support- 
 ing arts, nor in its imperial democracy. 
 Need of the records of its mighty deeds 
 rested on the human spirit — record of 
 all the stirring and cui'ious world before 
 men's eyes — to amaze and edify future gen- 
 erations. These Hellenes had the sense of 
 race vocation, trusteeship, we have seen. 
 Their gifts were not for themselves alone. 
 They felt themselves charged with legacies to 
 
250 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 future generations. A Homer must appear, 
 a first real seer of Hellenic history. The 
 genius at hand was Herodotus, born in Asian 
 Halicarnassus in 484 before Christ, himself 
 an amalgam — of Dorian blood, he expressed 
 the facile Ionian spirit. In his writing Greek 
 prose literature became fairly developed. 
 
 Oracular legends of an ancient enmity be- 
 tween the Hellenes and Asiatic peoples had 
 long been current, we have seen. Homer had 
 told it in his battle of the Achseans with the 
 Asiatics. Tales of the actual present antag- 
 onism and contest between these peoples had 
 filled minds of at least two generations of 
 Hellenes before Herodotus saw the light. 
 Nothing could be more natural than for him 
 to take the profaning war of Persian invasion 
 for his subject, the conflict between the social 
 will of Hellas and its challenging race, and 
 interpret it with the religious imaginative- 
 ness that characterized his times, making his 
 groundwork an explication of the way of God 
 to man. 
 
 He wrote, he said, "to save from decay the 
 remembrance of what men have done, and 
 to prevent the mighty and marvelous actions 
 of the Greeks and barbarians failing of their 
 
HISTORIANS 251 
 
 meed of glory." He made an organic epic. 
 A divine foretliought, an envy of the gods, a 
 mighty moral order, the finger of deity in all 
 human affairs, the will of social progress, 
 allots ruin even to the third and fourth gen- 
 eration to the immoderateness of men, to 
 their excess, arrogance and crime. That is 
 the idea underlying the history of Herodotus. 
 It colors the narrative, and the speeches 
 which are lyric outbursts. The historian was 
 saturated with the faith in human affairs of 
 an ever-present retributive justice. Nemesis, 
 which begetting in the godhead jealousy and 
 enmity that man should aspire to power and 
 nurse overwhelming ambition, humiliates hu- 
 man pride : upon all men of foremost condi- 
 tion disaster must come. A poet filled with 
 a religious enthusiasm, he set out in his work 
 action of the law of righteousness. Just as 
 to the Jews in the Old Testament, so to this 
 Greek historian, his race's history was the 
 tribunal of the justice of God. 
 
 The narrative of this ethnic story of He- 
 rodotus, its candor and simplicity and persua- 
 sion, its pathos, its human quality and the 
 garrulous delight of its telling, fitted it for 
 sucli recitation as epic lays enjoyed at festi- 
 
252 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 vals. Accounts say tliat the author gave a 
 public reading and had pay therefor at the 
 great pan-Athensea of 446 before Christ. 
 
 This detailed, dramatic recounting of the 
 father of history sprang from the peace and 
 fertility of the Hellenic spirit at the end of 
 the Persian wars, and reflected conditions 
 that inspired the early singers. Thucydides, 
 born but thirteen years after Herodotus, also 
 wrote a drama of which he was a painstak- 
 ing, accurate, trustworthy eye-witness and 
 doer-of deeds, — one may say drama because 
 the form of the history of Thucydides shows 
 permeation of the tragic spirit. His psychol- 
 ogy is that of the drama, and his construction 
 somewhat resembles the drama of ^schylus. 
 In this story the parties are warring states 
 and the end sought the leadership of Athens. 
 
 But Thucydides is austere. He loves no 
 detailed description, no old-fashioned, legend- 
 ary tales as did his elder brother-historian. 
 He analyzes character with keen penetration 
 — what motives impelled the actors in affairs, 
 what social forces produced the results. 
 "Those who wish," he said, "to see clearly 
 what has happened and what like events may 
 hereafter happen, in the order of human af- 
 
GROUNDING OF THE DRAMA 253 
 
 fairs, will find what I have written useful 
 aids." His compact thought, his love of 
 truth and dispassionate effort to justify the 
 opposing parties as they would, and even 
 then did, justify themselves, his distinct, 
 precise, significant diction, his long vision, 
 his close-knit reasoning with its quality of 
 lasting validity, mark him as the first writer 
 of vigorous, philosophical history, and one 
 who vivified and enriched the writing of his- 
 tory for all time. 
 
 How the Greeks of their day saw the worth 
 of life, their interpreting of life with ethical 
 meaning, what to their religious sense was 
 the divine will, the histories of Herodotus 
 and Thucydides in one way show. But with 
 Thucydides expression of religious emotion 
 is translated into philosophic phrase. The 
 inexplicable element in history he calls 
 chance, tyche, "^^XV- 
 
 RISE OF THE DRAMA: SUCH MASTERS AS 
 
 AESCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES, 
 
 ARISTOPHANES 
 
 Through poetry, however, the Hellenic 
 genius must again find expression fitted to 
 its time, That welling of the spirit for ut- 
 
254 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 terance of the laws of human life, that cere- 
 bral excitement that heats and molds ideas 
 about it to the emotional pitch of rhythm, 
 must again be a faithful voice of the age. 
 Poetry has always thriven in great crises of 
 history. That is, a literature can ground it- 
 self only on the ethos, the faith and ethical 
 concepts of a people. Its roots must be in 
 their life. The sap that feeds it and gives 
 it expansive strength and detailed beauty 
 must come from the religious and ethical 
 ardor of its people. 
 
 A literature interpretative of race-con- 
 sciousness we have seen the vmd growth of 
 since Homer. Of what the Greek muse ear- 
 liest sang, when, in the full noontide of 
 Homer's epic day, minstrel and rhapsodist 
 journeyed through Ionian state and island, 
 we have caught echoes in the great objective 
 epos. The day's twilight brought the 
 master's perfect song. Then, we know, a 
 darkness of shifting shapes settled over 
 Hellas till the lyric, a product many-tongued, 
 bom centuries before but slowly maturing, 
 difficult to measure because its miniature 
 qualities ever helped to its loss, but as com- 
 plete and genuine a racenpte as the epic, came 
 
GROUNDING OF THE DRAMA 255 
 
 in witli the new dawn. Voices of the Lesbian 
 and other singers sounded throughout the 
 Hellenic world stirring anew with art. "We 
 have seen in the autonomous feeling leaping 
 to life out of groups of monarchic mold, that 
 in subjective expression the elegy evolved, 
 the iambus, the lyric of single thought and 
 feeling, and even the song of blended senti- 
 ment of the Dorian chorus. 
 
 We have seen in the years following the 
 Persian wars that race and religious ardor 
 of the Hellenes had intensive stimulation. 
 Now great events had spiritualized the old 
 faiths in divine power, the practices of the 
 people reinvigorated belief in its providence 
 towards the race. Then again, before the de- 
 light of the people at the repulsion of Asia 
 had declined, the inclusion at the beginning of 
 Pericles' persuasive career of Athenians in 
 the jury systems had told upon Athenian 
 character profoundly. The law history testi- 
 fies to among other peoples, that a broaden- 
 ing of suffrage rights brings a deepening of 
 the religious sense to those enfranchised, had 
 proved itself in Hellas. 
 
 Every generation craves sensitive re- 
 flectors to mirror its own peculiar spirit. 
 
256 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 The spiritual life of every generation, we say, 
 must sink into decadence unless it renews it- 
 self in intimate union witli cosmic conscious- 
 ness and creates afresh expression of its life. 
 When preeminence and political liberty had 
 come to Athens, the Hellenes stamped their 
 genius upon another racial form. Architec- 
 ture we have seen combining the two spirit- 
 ual phases of the Hellene, the southern and 
 northern, blending the two to form a third. 
 This synthesis of mind fired also the creative 
 impulse of literary art. The serene, joyous 
 impulse of the Ionian Greeks, the spirit that 
 had luxuriated in recounting the epic, in the 
 setting forth the philosopher and physicist 
 and historian, and had penetrated the recesses 
 of the human heart in elegiac and iambic 
 poetry — Ionic grace and mobility, now in 
 unity with the stern, ethic god-call and abid- 
 ing sense of god-presence of the Doric chorus, 
 was giving the world Greek drama. To per- 
 fect the evolution had needed many genera- 
 tions. Greek tragedy ' ' advanced by slow de- 
 grees, ' ' said Aristotle long after. In this age 
 of Athens it took perfect form. Man in the 
 energy of free action calls for action repre- 
 sented. 
 
GROUNDING OF THE DRAMA 257 
 
 Winter and springtime, then as now, were 
 seasons of many worshipful festivals — fes- 
 tivals in many instances connected with ob- 
 lations and rites to Earth for bountiful 
 fruits, and to Sun, maker of seasons. They 
 refer back to primitive peoples, and in many 
 instances, as in Greece, were connected with 
 the invoking, stimulating, strengthening of 
 the spirit of fertility. 
 
 From about the 19th to the 21st of our De- 
 cember, song and dance, probably pantomime 
 and buffoonery, and also improvised plays by 
 wandering players added zest to country 
 sports in Attica. These distinguished the 
 Country Dionysia. Merry-makings of the 
 feast, somewhat like the materiality with 
 which we every year celebrate our Christmas, 
 may have distorted the initial object of the 
 celebration, which was, as we said, to give 
 magic potency to the exuberant forces of 
 nature then buried, to stimulate growth, to 
 strengthen by wanton excess the god of vege- 
 tation whose powers were in that season sus- 
 pended. Tumultuous processions of mum- 
 mers noisily singing, inebriately dancing, 
 bearing a symbol of the quickening force of 
 nature, called for the god of life. Then the 
 
258 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 new "wine was first tasted, and sustenance in 
 cakes and frnit offered. 
 
 To awaken or to strengthen the sleeping 
 god, msenads sought still further in the lesser 
 feast of the Lensea, during the last days of 
 our January, when, according to an old scho- 
 liast, a bearer of a flaming torch held the 
 brand aloft and cried to the assembled people, 
 "Invoke the god"; and all those present 
 shouted "lacchus, son of Semele, thou giver 
 of wealth!" 
 
 About the first of our March, at the Anthes- 
 teria, the feast that causes things to bloom, 
 when the wine of the last year was ready to 
 drink, each household opened its casks, re- 
 ligiously made libations to the god, and 
 decked their rooms with early spring flowers. 
 Again was the feast of the bringing up of 
 creative impulse and growth. Earth, source 
 and mother of all, held below its surface dur- 
 ing four months of winter a latent, slumber- 
 ing divinity, to whom rain-clouds were sacred, 
 and fertilizing rain and dew. The people 
 must resurrect and stimulate the god that he 
 may pour life into the soil "in the holy season 
 of spring. ' ' * 
 
 ' Peoples not Greek celebrated similar processes of 
 
GROUNDING OF THE DRAMA 259 
 
 The folk massed at a temple in solemn and 
 secret services. In other ways emotion 
 socialized itself. Choruses competed honor- 
 ing the merry young god in song and dance. 
 The whole folk reveled and masqueraded, 
 parading after a statue of the god, as myth- 
 ical followers of Dionysus, as Bacchse, as 
 nymphs, and finally retired for banquets. 
 Barren winter was dead and teeming life 
 abroad in the land. 
 
 This rebirth festival, this joy at the re- 
 newal of life, was also one of revocation of 
 souls, when in the upward motion of the tide 
 of life spirits of the dead significantly rose 
 and went about. Their households set out 
 pots of food and feasted the souls and poured 
 on tombs libations of placation. And be- 
 cause it was also a feast of purification they 
 
 nature — for instance, believing the god of fertility slept 
 in winter, the Lydians, when the sun brought back the 
 spring, danced with enthusiasm; and tribes in the north 
 of Europe held the feast of Ostara (Easter), the 
 Anglo-Saxon goddess of springing, fertilizing time. To 
 our day Christians of the Greek Church in Thrace ob- 
 serve fertility rites in their Lenten carnival — men of a 
 village masquerading in goatskins, and finally, after 
 various doings symbolic, putting on a yoke and praying 
 for a good harvest as they drag the plow. 
 
260 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 put pitch on their doors and practiced other 
 rites of aversion of malign influences. At 
 this Anthesteria fell the ceremony of the 
 mystic marriage of Dionysus with the wife 
 of the king archon, a symbolic union of the 
 refreshment of the blood of the people and 
 the life of the soil, and thus reverently es- 
 teemed an assistance to the growth of crops. 
 
 About the first of our April, in the Greater 
 Dionysia, the people celebrated the preva- 
 lence of summer, and their joy that Dionysus 
 had wholly delivered his folk from decay of 
 vegetation and the needs and cares of winter. 
 Again the earth was putting forth her yield, 
 and with the impelling aid of the god of life 
 should bear fruitful harvest. 
 
 The idealizing ritual of Dionysus, the great 
 vegetative god, had, we have seen, become in 
 sentiment and ideas the property of the state, 
 and had gradually superimposed itself upon 
 the rites of the Olympian gods, especially 
 upon the worship of the season-god Apollo, 
 and also of the pre-Greek liturgy of Mother 
 Earth. It had crystallized after its own na- 
 ture the worship of the spirit of fertility in 
 other cults. Here again is evident that im- 
 pelling genius of the Hellenes to put in poetic 
 
GROUNDING OF THE DRAMA 261 
 
 and plastic form their spiritual life's intima- 
 cies and unities with the world, with the bar- 
 renness of winter, the jocund spring, the 
 fruition of summer and gifts of the fall of 
 the year. 
 
 In Dorian cities so far back as in the time 
 of Alcman, we have seen that singers taught 
 by a chorus master and dancers trained to 
 military precision offered, in behalf of the 
 people, thanks to the gods by chanting and 
 dancing poems. So malleable, so pliable a 
 form was the Dorian choral, whether it were 
 a joyous psean to the sun-god Apollo, or a 
 dithyrambic ode of enthusiasm to Dionysus, 
 that the song and its expressive dance might 
 run from gladness and gayety to grave so- 
 lemnity. In a member of the chorus imper- 
 sonating the god, or telling his perils, and 
 the chorus expressing the sympathies of a 
 pious mind with the sorrows of Dionysus, 
 tragedy may have had its birth. Exactly 
 how we know not, perhaps in a dithyrambic 
 song of spring when a cyclic chorus dressed 
 as satyrs sang and danced goat-songs to the 
 god of generation. Or tragedy may have 
 grown as is lately claimed, from the Dorian 
 usage of honoring heroes with solemn hymns 
 
262 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 sung round their graves, all referring back to 
 a primitive worsliip of the dead. Whatever 
 its origin, it was unmistakably religious and 
 embodied racial consciousness." So to unite 
 the lyric action of the Doric chorus with the 
 Ionic recitative, with the dramatic dialogue 
 of the wandering rhapsode, and to bring forth 
 tragedy complete, fell to the inspiration of 
 these times. The seizure of the Hellenes' 
 spirit with the content and form of tragedy 
 became so intense that its evolution affected 
 forms of literary composition outside poetry. 
 It directed the historians, as we have seen. 
 It impelled even oratory when the speech- 
 writer prepared his client's address to the 
 court, and persisted even to the time when 
 Plato cast his speculations in dramatic dia- 
 logue. 
 
 This stirring and striving age of Hellas 
 brought the drama to perfection, we say, and 
 gave dramatic writers a dignity never paral- 
 leled before or since. The Hellenes were now 
 
 ^ Turning from the Greek a moment, it is curious to 
 note that the East Indian drama had its origin in the 
 blending of epic and lyric forms, and in religious emo- 
 tion, and the Chinese in the union of the arts of dancing 
 and singing. 
 
^SCHYLUS 263 
 
 producing an exalted poetry alive with an 
 ethico-pMlosopMc religion, a mental and emo- 
 tional education never possessed by any other 
 people. In Athens great tragedies appealed 
 so thoroughly to the heart of the mass, and 
 were so popular a religious service that, since 
 the gods delight in the joy of their folk to 
 see and hear worshipful functions, an obol 
 from the public funds was finally made ready 
 for each citizen to buy an entrance ticket. A 
 public capable of appreciating and delight- 
 ing in the perfection of such plays does not 
 now exist, and never has existed except in 
 the Athens of the age of their production. 
 Spectacles of unendurable misfortune in the 
 lives of race heroes effected, in Hellenic esti- 
 mation, what Aristotle called catharsis, an 
 emotional purification, — and made the citizen 
 content to bear his easier mishaps and esteem 
 his narrower life felicitous. Through all its 
 growth and ripening the tragic play never 
 lost its identification with the Hellenes' idea 
 of deity, and their faith in the essential unity 
 of mankind. 
 
 A man who witnessed the fateful crises of 
 the battles of Marathon and Salamis, and 
 that a man of profound insight, who had seen 
 
264 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 his race breaking the omnipotence of the 
 ruler of rulers, humbling the world-compel- 
 ling army of the great king to the dust — such 
 a man would feel in human affairs the venge- 
 ance that pursues crime, and his work would 
 reflect nemesis — the Nemesis Herodotus set 
 forth, ^schylus embodied qualities of this 
 generation of the Athenians, their conscious- 
 ness of right, of honor and the public virtue 
 that was the foundation, after the Persian 
 wars, of Athens' glory. Whatever of his 
 mighty plays are preserved to us are vivid 
 with vast, enlarging and ennobling emotion. 
 They declare the boldness of soul nurtured 
 by great thoughts. They have the old se- 
 verity of devotion to law that Solon taught, 
 and regard for race habits and breeding, a 
 Dorian, deeply brooding conception of life. 
 
 Uniting with the purified spirit of the times 
 they spiritualized the old religion of Zeus and 
 gross myths. Dramatic and majestic forms, 
 types, abstractions, traditional ideals possess- 
 ing the imagination, gleaming in the half- 
 light of an elder world, express in super- 
 human language wonder, exalted resignation 
 and faith in the immanence and direction in 
 
^SCHYLUS 265 
 
 human life of supreme wisdom and power. 
 They partake of the character of the sculp- 
 ture — the stable, universal, traditional ideals 
 spoken of on foregoing page 237. They em- 
 body the primal note of tragedy — ^mutability 
 and reversal of fortune, fate, inscrutable 
 power striking at titan and man, at pride, at 
 well-calculated plans and bringing all to dust 
 — ^he who pursues power wars with the un- 
 conquerable which masters all humans alike. 
 In the ' ' Prometheus, ' ' a drama which takes 
 up with the loftiness of ancient Hebrew 
 thought, and intensity of emotion of the old 
 Hebrew lyric, the condition and relation of the 
 human race, Prometheus helps on the mind 
 of man aspiring with ardor to higher planes, 
 seeking to gain such perfect knowledge and 
 art as the immortals have set aside for them- 
 selves. This is defiance of Zeus, a Divine 
 Will and harsh, avenging god of justice, and 
 the titan, hero-savior, who "loved mortals 
 overmuch," himself perishes amid rolling 
 thunder and the lightnings which the high 
 god hurls. The sinner 's own presumption in 
 over-stepping moral order, and his excess 
 fling him to ruin. 
 
266 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 "The blow that fells the sinner is of God, 
 And as he wills, the rod 
 Of vengeance smiteth sore." 
 
 Like every other Greek tragedy of these 
 years, the "Prometheus" action is inner, 
 spiritual, effecting the catharsis of Aristotle. 
 It makes way for an elevating and assuaging 
 tranquillity. It demands man's faith, awe 
 and devotion in a divine government and its 
 righteousness. Profound ideas inform such 
 plays. Truth, loftiness and sublimity inhere 
 in them in simple strength and never degen- 
 erate. 
 
 Still Sophocles, in fact, centers the poetic 
 consciousness of this age. Bom thirty years 
 after -^schylus and therefore maturing out- 
 side those national woes the heart of ^schy- 
 lus knew, Sophocles most completely stamped 
 his work with that quality of the Hellenes 
 called harmony, wise moderation, composure 
 and noble resignation. His plays have about 
 them the serenity and balance of the Par- 
 thenon which grew to its perfection before 
 his eyes. 
 
 The vague, shadowy titans of ^schylus 
 give way in Sophocles' poems to Hellenic 
 perspicuity; the characters, less godlike. 
 
SOPHOCLES 267 
 
 are more hiimaii and of Greek precision of 
 form. In their ethical ideas, in their concep- 
 tion of a supreme sustainer of the moral law 
 and order, in setting out the favorite Greek 
 theory of the human in relation to the di- 
 vine — instability of good fortune and the 
 limitation to the will of man ; hut greater still 
 in the message of the unfathomable meaning 
 of human life, his plays are of surpass- 
 ing splendor. Their Greek atmosphere per- 
 sists with amazing potency. To-day we sit 
 amazed at their penetrating simplicity, at 
 their enlightened piety and the ideal nobility 
 of their characters. We seem to see, as an- 
 other has said, and to have present in living 
 motion before us, the souls of those Athe- 
 nians sculptured by Pheidias round the frieze 
 of the Parthenon. Like the sculptor, the 
 poet declared he "made humans as they 
 should be." Sophocles was a master in the 
 analysis of the great elemental emotions of 
 men, in the working of passion and power in 
 the spirit of man. He ' ' saw life steadily and 
 saw it whole." 
 
 His inimitable art developed at a period 
 when masses of Athenians especially, in 
 shaded portico and theater, in jury court and 
 
268 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 the great public assembly, were reflecting 
 and speculating and completing mastery of 
 their thoughts and their fluid, subtle 
 speech. 
 
 From this broad, massive understanding of 
 and sympathy with human life grew the 
 poet 's keen and exquisite power of words and 
 his flowing narrative and choral song. The 
 universal interest in the human everywhere 
 rife in the time of Sophocles, is doubtless the 
 source of the grace and sweetness, the ster- 
 ling gentleness that distinguish his plays. 
 His art was supremely Greek in presenting 
 the lasting, the divine characteristics of the 
 human being — which should not be marred or 
 distorted by lawlessness or suffering. In re- 
 ligious lore he picked the spiritual and left 
 the grosser. His piety was peculiarly apt in 
 presenting the universal significance that lay 
 under the outward form of the popular re- 
 ligion. "In things that touch upon the 
 gods," he said, "it is best to shun unholy 
 pride." "Nothing is base to which the gods 
 lead us." In the emotional, creative power 
 of genius and the intellectual, critical facul- 
 ties, Sophocles stood midway between the fel- 
 low-citizens of jEschylus whose beacon was a 
 
EURIPIDES 269 
 
 race-embedded morality and the lighter age 
 that applauded Euripides. 
 
 Sophocles, said Aristotle, represents men 
 as they ought to be; Euripides men as they 
 are. The noble beauty of Sophocles' heroes 
 and the Hellenic simplicity, harmony and 
 delicate adjustment to end of the poet's 
 work changes in the drama of the third great 
 tragic poet of Hellas, born when ^schylus 
 was forty-five and Sophocles fifteen. Eace 
 myth is still the poet's subject, but his heroes 
 are particularized into unique individuals, 
 and the atmosphere is saturated with man's 
 waywardness and the discord and confusion 
 of human life. This means a dying-out of the 
 ideal of tragedy. 
 
 Euripides, most speculative poet and 
 prophet of free thought, is repelled by popu- 
 lar forms in portraying the Hellenes' divini- 
 ties. To this critical attitude of mind he 
 gives varied expression. "These legends of 
 spousals and god lording it over another god 
 are the minstrels' sorry tales," he sings. 
 And again, "If the gods do anything base, 
 they are not gods." Yet a profound re- 
 ligious feeling he expressed in this prayer of 
 Hecuba's: 
 
270 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 "0 prop of earth, thou who hast thy seat upon the 
 
 earth, 
 Whoever thou mayst be, Zeus, past finding out — ^whether 
 
 law of nature or mind o'f man. 
 To thee I pray; for through noiseless path dost thou 
 
 with justice lead mortal things." 
 
 And in another form lie cries to the 
 world-pervading mind: "Thee, self -begotten, 
 who in the whirl of the heavens dost 
 interweave the nature of all things, about 
 whom is light, round whom dusky, spangled- 
 bodied night and unnumbered hosts of stars 
 continually do dance!" 
 
 The poet no longer held one transported 
 to another world, however. Abiding in this 
 he turned to humanity for his ideals, and with 
 hquid and flexible periods, and the poetizing 
 of every-day speech, he would present the 
 naked thought and action of humans. Lo- 
 quacity and temper for argument that settled 
 on the Athenians especially during the second 
 half of the Peloponnesian war, one outcome 
 of the sophist, Euripides doubtless mirrors in 
 his plays. But they also have another as- 
 sociate of those years — a democratic sym- 
 pathy with subjects of evil economic condi- 
 tions, the poor and oppressed, and every- 
 
COMEDY AND ARISTOPHANES 271 
 
 where and always the Athenian clarity of in- 
 tellect. Euripides' tragedies were a com- 
 ponent part of the age of rhetoric and dialec- 
 tics now developing, and its mordant ques- 
 tionings at large through the people concern- 
 ing the old religion and individual and social 
 rights. 
 
 Thus building their tragedy ^schylus, 
 Sophocles and Euripides became organs of 
 the Greek consciousness. In the dramatic 
 competitions at the two great festivals of 
 Dionysus every year, other poets contested 
 whose works we do not know, and often those 
 to us unknown gained the prize, aided possi- 
 bly by a better training and equipment of the 
 chorus, over masters we esteem unrivaled. 
 According to "The Frogs" of Aristophanes 
 popular taste for tragic poetry was so great 
 that "striplings composed more than ten 
 thousand tragedies and chattered more by a 
 stadium than Euripides. . . . paltry little 
 grapes, praters, twittering places of spar- 
 rows, disgracers of art." 
 
 G-reatness of mind that acts in unity with 
 ultimate law and beauty tragedy sets out. 
 To make the noble more notable art intro- 
 duces the mind that perverts order and acts 
 
272 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 out its own humor, or folly, or deformity, or 
 shallowness, or abnormal view of life. 
 
 In its essence comedy is the child of democ- 
 racy, the equality of men who flay one an- 
 other in jovial merriment. It could not he a 
 product of the court of tyrannus or noble, the 
 very life of which is preserved by security 
 of freedom from ridicule and jest. The 
 grounding of its spirit must be a later per- 
 fection than tragedy. 
 
 Greek comedy belongs to a country life 
 where acquaintance was sure and equality un- 
 suspended. A rumor gives its origin to the 
 Dorians — ^because that folk were possessed of 
 a rude, individual joviality. Amid such it 
 may have evolved, from the license of a har- 
 vest feast, some festival of the vintage god 
 when revelers indulged in ribald witticism 
 and gross ridicule of persons and conditions. 
 Swift after the end of a chorus to Bacchus, 
 that exuberant god who himself reveling in 
 mocking gibe had vouchsafed the choric com- 
 pany song and dance, the folk may have 
 taken for granted the plain-spoken, unre- 
 strained joke. The joke's near kin, ludicrous 
 imitation and mock dignity, would soon be 
 knocking for entrance as master of the revels. 
 
COMEDY AND ARISTOPHANES 273 
 
 However, since writers of comedy should 
 possess a vantage of deep conception and real 
 refinement, and also penetrating vision into 
 the abnormalities and basenesses and follies 
 of men, the holder of the mocMng masque 
 might have a bitter seriousness. 
 
 Even when the comic muse of Hellas had 
 come to full brilliance in Athens, much of its 
 original spirit abode, and arbitrary quizzing 
 of the individual still went on. But Attic 
 comedy did not confine its activities to reality 
 and probability and their laws. Imagination 
 of soaring height distinguished it, indulged 
 in political as well as trenchant personal satv 
 ire, and personified whatever it pleased and 
 how it pleased. 
 
 Aristophanes, chiefest of Athenian comedy 
 writers, a poet of rich and felicitous phrase, 
 a consununate artist, a conservative antipa- 
 thetic to new ideas, hating Socrates' cease- 
 less test and scrutiny, a violent factionary 
 against the Athenian democracy and its 
 changeful temper, attacked in airy, high- 
 wrought fantasies contentions of his age, 
 placing them for instance in "Cloud-cuckoo- 
 town," and with poignant, grotesque ridicule 
 the more popular and conspicuous men, even 
 
274 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Socrates and his "thinking-sliop," and also 
 the gods and the women of Athens. His 
 plays gained an undoubted chief end — they 
 entertained and amused coteries of young 
 men of Athens. 
 
 If an ideal of the comic muse may be an 
 all-in-all drunken distortion of real life, then 
 the juggling and license of Aristophanes are 
 peaks of perfection. 
 
 The political equality of Athens and the 
 ragged, hungry, poor, landless, unemployed 
 because of the competition of slave labor, cit- 
 izens to whom the equality permitted hope of 
 food and life, are his especial butt. Fraud, in 
 a democracy open to the light of day, uniting 
 with ignorant pretense fought for political 
 control. Aristophanes bitterly condemned 
 the freedom and equality that gave men 
 chance for good as well as for ill. 
 
 In the stress of events comedy was impo- 
 tent. Eidicule of rulers, bitter and libelous 
 attacks, scornful laughter, became not so 
 palatable to the people. The ending of the 
 Peloponnesian war in the reduction of Athens 
 broke the energy of public life and damped the 
 ardor of the comic muse. 
 
THE SOPHISTS 275 
 
 COMING OF THE SOPHISTS AND THE NEW 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 Through the centuries marked by a 
 burgeoning individualism we have seen the 
 speculative mind of Greece employed mainly 
 in the order of nature, and looking to man as 
 a part of nature. That mind was still youth- 
 ful. From the inefficacies and conflicts of the 
 philosophers' conclusions, from hasty gener- 
 alizations, doubt arose among men as to 
 the righteousness of probing the universe's 
 secret. They pronounced in broadspread 
 murmurs the old physieo-metaphysical in- 
 quiries impious, knowledge the gods reserved 
 for themselves. 
 
 A new field was, however, opening. Al- 
 ready for hundreds of years the Hellenes had 
 peered into the conduct of life and had made 
 for its government naive, elemental rules. 
 The early gnomic poets afforded such laws in 
 especial form. Precepts of theirs and prov- 
 erbs we have seen long settled into a part 
 of the education of Greek youth. Moral 
 conceptions of the early philosophers had 
 also become a part of the possessions of 
 the race. Evolution in ethical thought, the 
 
276 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 elevating of the social mind and will, goes 
 slowly. 
 
 But emotions of an individualizing age, 
 poetically feeling and affirming of physical 
 appearances and of human rights, were now 
 giving way to a virile capacity, to inductive, 
 analytic discourse, to profounder thinking, 
 weighing, judging, to effort at logical classi- 
 fication. The impulses of the time in the 
 poetry of the time, the Athenian drama, wit- 
 ness the Greek mind engaged in major prob- 
 lems of human existence and the inhering and 
 ever-present democratic sentiment — in the re- 
 lations of the individual as a member of an 
 organized society. 
 
 These subjects not only poets and his- 
 torians treated — assemblies, gymnasia, the- 
 aters, pubHc walks, were alive with dis- 
 cussions of human conduct ; what was honor- 
 able; what justice; what piety; what base; 
 what expedient ; what not ; all growths rooted 
 in anterior centuries, now nurtured by de- 
 mocracy and fertilized by the sophists and 
 other discussers of civic relations. With un- 
 precedented development of the genius of 
 social order went evolution in reason and re- 
 flection, and presented a new conception of 
 
THE SOPHISTS 277 
 
 the science of human conduct — the old educa- 
 tion, old sanctions for conduct, having lost 
 force. 
 
 At Athens the progressive, speculative 
 spirit had attracted men of new, radical 
 ideas. Hand in hand with the city's out- 
 blossoming in art and literature, within a few 
 years after the battle of Salamis, a class of 
 men not before known flourished within her 
 public places, itinerant teachers, private pro- 
 fessors, "sophists" they called themselves, 
 who undertook to teach by facile theory, not 
 by slow, hard-bought practice as heretofore, 
 wisdom and virtue. In other cities than 
 Athens, gathering youth about them, they 
 spoke in public street and portico, and also at 
 the Olympic and other national festivals. In 
 their very origin and progress race feeling 
 and race pride abounded. They were a by- 
 product of the spirit of their age, upon which 
 in turn they acted largely. 
 
 Just as minstrels had recited in public 
 place the old epic lays, so now sophists clad 
 in purple delivered, for a good round price, 
 speeches often polished with consummate 
 art. They instructed and swayed the under- 
 standing of the crowds by their persuasive 
 
278 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 dialectical conversation.^" In Athens their 
 appeal and influence was often among a newly 
 emancipated populace inclined to treat with 
 contempt the difficult, ethically ruled educa- 
 tion of the past. Magnificent promises and 
 flattery to those who paid high fees, preten- 
 sions to pass upon all institutions and all 
 peoples, marked the ministrations of the 
 more superficial of their number. They 
 sensed their countrymen's pace and their 
 teachings accelerated it. They foreran the 
 popular and forensic oratory and the gram- 
 marians' science. 
 
 The old, conservative ideal of education, 
 god-fearing, law-abiding, national, a puri- 
 tanic circumscribing self to every faculty's 
 performance of its function, exalting duty to 
 the state and its religion, socialistic in 
 quality, aristocratic in practice, tending if 
 carried to furthest logic to recede from plia- 
 bility, — this old ideal in education was now 
 
 ^^ These itinerant dialecticians, it is interesting to 
 note, theolognies have claimed to be direct ancestors in 
 method of those early church fathers and doctors who 
 went about announcing their evangel and using dialectic 
 for conversion. They were therefore prototype of the 
 sermonizer of to-day. 
 
THE OLD AND NEW EDUCATION 279 
 
 giving way to a new form, liberal, individual- 
 istic in quality, forgetful of the potence of 
 righteousness and moral discipline, departing 
 from vigorous, systematic exercise, freely ex- 
 pending and enjoying self in luxuries, teach- 
 ing no real thing existed, contemptuously les- 
 sening the influence of old-fashioned prin- 
 ciples and of law, discrediting religious rever- 
 ence and the gods of the people and bring- 
 ing forward a showy reasoning, a flippant, 
 shallow cleverness and a puffball acuteness. 
 According to new standards the old ideal did 
 not produce free and cultivated men. And 
 these standards witness that the health, unity 
 and glory of their country were coming to be 
 no longer the chief wish of its citizens. Aris- 
 tophanes, in the year 423, humorously and 
 vigorously set the old education against the 
 new in his comedy "The Clouds" — ^in part as 
 follows : — 
 
 "Let me tell of the old-fashioned educa- 
 tion," said Eight Discourse, "as it prevailed 
 when I was flourishing and self-control was 
 respected. In the first place a child was not 
 allowed to grumble. At that time, in orderly 
 fashion, together, through the streets, all the 
 boys of the wa,rd had to march, scantily 
 
280 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 dressed too, even if tlie snow did come down 
 like barley groats, to the master of music. 
 Then they learned to rehearse a song without 
 compressing their sides — either 'Pallas, 
 great stormer of cities,' or 'Afar a shout 
 resounding,' putting vim into the melody 
 their fathers had handed down. If any one 
 of them played the buffoon, or tried any sud- 
 den changes such as these now-a-days difficult 
 trills of Phrynis, he got a beating for having 
 discredited the Muses. . . . Nor at dinner was 
 it permitted youth to take the head of the 
 radish, nor to snatch anise and parsley from 
 their elders, nor to live on fish and thrushes, 
 nor to sit with legs crossed. . . . Take cour- 
 age, youngster, and choose me as the Better 
 Discourse, and you shall learn to hate the 
 market-place, and keep away from the bath- 
 houses and be ashamed of shameful deeds, 
 and blaze up if anyone jeers at you, and rise 
 from your seat when your elders approach, 
 and never do any rudeness to your parents, 
 or any shameful thing whatever which shall 
 mar the image of Modest Reverence. . . . 
 Then healthy and blooming you will spend 
 your time in the gymnasia, not chattering in 
 
SOCRATES 281 
 
 the market-place, dealing in coarse jokes like 
 the young men of this day." 
 
 The ferment of spirit which had given free 
 political institutions in Athens had of neces- 
 sity, we have said, produced instruction for 
 fitting electors to perform citizens' duties. 
 An eloquence, sonorous and melodic effect, 
 the value of the persuasive word, the salient 
 phrase, had been dear to the Greek heart 
 since Homer sang of Achilles trained to be 
 "a speaker of words and a doer of deeds." 
 It had now come to have highest significance 
 — Euripides voiced the Greek feehng, "Per- 
 suasion save in speech hath no temple ' ' — for 
 to an elector of a democracy it held within 
 its possibilities mastership in politics. This 
 wish the sophists of the fifth century met and 
 embodied in their instructions. 
 
 Man, it is clear, was the root of the Athe- 
 nian philosophy — the reality of human rela- 
 tions, human duties, the action of men to- 
 wards one another and as units in the state. 
 Protagoras of Abdera, a most eminent 
 sophist, had said "man is the measure of all 
 things"; that is, the fruit of philosophy is 
 the good of the individual. Attention was to 
 
282 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 become reflex and lead to self-understand- 
 ing. Socrates turned this into the seeking of 
 human well-being founded upon general laws. 
 "Learn to know thyself" — ^what thou art and 
 what thy abilities for human use; to study 
 man apart from the physical world referring 
 in the main to man 's relations to his fellows. 
 
 The age of the profoundest of sophists, 
 Socrates, was now come, the first age to con- 
 ceive of an ethical science distinct and apart, 
 its end the art of righteousness and social 
 living. Those who knew these matters Soc- 
 rates accounted good and honorable. Genu- 
 ine knowledge, he thought, constrained to 
 practice: the ignorant he assimilated to 
 slaves. Eeal knowledge is thus a power, an 
 impulsive principle, character. Virtue is 
 wisdom ; vice ignorance. No one errs of his 
 own free will. "Every one wishes for his 
 own good and would gain it if he could." 
 
 A testing, scrutinizing, refutative, negative 
 force in speculation, unmasking the plausible, 
 the pretentious, the one-sided, the false, had 
 already shone forth in the Greek spirit. The 
 philosopher Zeno had uttered it. This the 
 dialectic ^^ process of Socrates now expanded, 
 
 1^ Dialectic, as has been said, was but tbe argumenta- 
 
SOCRATES 283 
 
 asking frankly in ignorance and doubt as to 
 the appositeness of definitions from the cur- 
 rent sophists, until the minds of his hearers 
 fermented under his subtle irony and warm, 
 sunny rationalism. He would enter upon 
 men's souls, clear their understanding, and 
 convince them that most of their stock defini- 
 tions were fallacious, mere names, that lack- 
 ing clearness of conception they conceitedly 
 thought they had knowledge while in reality 
 they had none. 
 
 The total self-reliance and independence of 
 Socrates, his conviction of an apostolic 
 mission from God, his intellectual power and 
 stimulating originality, his critical, subtle 
 and humane spirit, made him the colossus of 
 all awakeners of dormant mentality. He was 
 both magnetic prophet and cool rationalist. 
 He sought to define men and things — ideas. 
 He would, feeling the danger in Athens of the 
 rule of ignorance and of those perverted by 
 
 tive, systematized conversation — a logomacby or "■word- 
 fight" — of a sharp-witted people, conducted with com- 
 plaisance, with persuasion, under recognized rules. 
 "Whithersoever the argument bears us, just as a wind 
 drives the ship, there must we go," said Socrates. The 
 method was a ladder in the later Plato's hands for 
 ascent towards truth. 
 
284 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 false standards, make men good through the 
 gymnastic of moral effort. He had toward 
 knowledge the enthusiasm, and toward edu- 
 cation the optimism, of the true democrat. 
 
 His aim to correct vicious tendencies and 
 to strengthen mental infirmities by series of 
 questions which brought out common opin- 
 ions, impelled thought and led to wholes and 
 principles of conduct. "He often made me 
 feel," said Alcibiades according to Plato's 
 report, "as if the life I am living I could not 
 endure to live." Plato called him "the gad- 
 fly" of the Athenians. "Of all men I have 
 ever known," said the great idealist, "he was 
 the wisest and justest and best." No illus- 
 tration was too obvious or homely for his 
 talk on practical conduct and for educing 
 force within his listeners. With whomsoever 
 he fell in, he was a fellow-enquirer. 
 
 Socrates' ministrations met the fate as- 
 signed those shocking contemporaries with 
 new ideas — the death loftiest and indomitable 
 altruism is apt to meet when it puts forth 
 a claim against the old habit. At his trial he 
 reviewed his career before the court. The 
 counts against him were of corrupting the 
 youth by his teachings and introducing false 
 
SOCRATES 285 
 
 gods — in obedience he confessed to an inner 
 voice, a divine sign, that since childhood had 
 commanded him. "To act thus was laid 
 iipon me by God, by prophecies, by dreams, 
 and in every way by which divine will lays it 
 upon man to act," Plato reports him saying.^^ 
 He had been called to teaching by the god at 
 Delphi. His mission was sane and religious. 
 "For I go about in order to persuade you 
 both young and old, not to care for your 
 bodies, nor for money, but especially for the 
 soul — how it shall become the best possible; 
 saying that virtue does not spring from 
 
 ^^ Many Hellenes, and especially Socrates and Plato, 
 foreran Christianity in teaching the individualism that 
 places our best efforts upon our spiritual life and sets 
 aside worldly estimate to approach more nearly a divine 
 wisdom and worth. In Socrates' prayer, for instance, 
 given at the end of Plato's "Phsedrus" — 
 
 Pan beloved, and other gods 
 Who now may be near me, 
 Grant that within — in inner life — 
 
 1 beautiful may be; 
 
 Let outward things^whate'er I have 
 
 My inner life set free. 
 
 The wise alone may I deem rich; 
 
 And grant, Pan, to me. 
 
 No more of gold than a moderate man 
 
 May use most easily. 
 
286 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 possessions but possessions from virtue, and 
 so also every other good among men both in 
 private and in public life.^^ "I should be a. 
 doer of guilty deeds, men of Athens, if . . . 
 my post at which God stationed me to seek 
 wisdom and examine myself and others, I 
 should desert through fear of death, or any- 
 thing whatever." "Now, therefore, men of 
 Athens, I am far from pleading my own 
 cause, as one might think, but I plead for 
 your sake, lest in condemning me you sin 
 in the matter of God's gift to you. For if 
 you slay me, you will not easily find another 
 such. . . . Persuaded by Anytus you may 
 lightly put me to death ; then pass the rest of 
 your lives lying in sleep, if God does not, in 
 love to you, send another evangelist." 
 
 Socrates was one of a class of men (like 
 the Hebrew prophets) who give themselves to 
 the moral reformation of mankind — ^moral 
 reformation meaning a cleansing, a purify- 
 
 ^' Centuries later Jesus, as reported by Matthew (vi, 
 33) was to say, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and 
 his righteousness, and all these things shall be added 
 unto you." All through its centuries of illumination 
 the Hellenic spirit was a prophet bespeaking its historic 
 sequel, the ideas of Christianity — ideas which it in scat- 
 tered parts enunciated and sqnt forth into the world. 
 
PLATO 287 
 
 ing. Sucli Puritanism government, and es- 
 pecially democracy, has ever found neces- 
 sary. He was, then, a puritan prophet of 
 righteousness, whose .conviction and earnest- 
 ness, says another, brushed aside levitat- 
 ing, equivocating artificialities, whose lips 
 preached and whose life practiced realities, 
 who spoke in words of calm content and con- 
 solation when at the approach of death he 
 turned eyes to another world, but found his 
 chiefest joys in the bonds of human fellow- 
 ship in this. 
 
 Onward from the time of Socrates ethics 
 was a distinct branch of philosophy. 
 
 Socrates, driving earnestly for whole, uni- 
 versal principles, had, seeking what virtue is, 
 fixed his thoughts on defining moral sanc- 
 tion — what is true. Before him had been 
 Parmenides' doctrine of static calm, a birth- 
 less, deathless, formless, impalpable Being, 
 One. Before him also the fertile mind of 
 Heraclitus had, as we have seen, put forth 
 the doctrine that all things in the world of 
 sense are ever in "flux and there is no know- 
 ing about them." 
 
 Under the especial influences of these three 
 minds, and also of the Spirit, pneuma. 
 
288 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 nvsujia, of Xenophanes, Plato, Socrates' 
 disciple, constructed what commentators have 
 called his theory of universals, of ideas — that 
 realities corresponding to the definitions are 
 other than the objects given in sense, that 
 realities are whole thoughts, things-in-them- 
 selves, splendid archetypes of the objects of 
 sense, eternal and immutable entities, the 
 same yesterday, to-day and forever. They 
 are the objects of all real knowledge. Just 
 as they lend themselves to the individual 
 when he thinks, so they are the creators of 
 our reason. Knowledge anterior to all ex- 
 perience had its source in this world of ideas. 
 Plato was bom near the beginning of the 
 Peloponnesian war and grew to manhood dur- 
 ing its conflict. His theory is a knitting to- 
 gether by a sovereign intellect of the idealism, 
 the old, unconscious and ineradicable tendency 
 to poetry, and its sensuous apprehensions, of 
 his race — an evolution of his inheritance — 
 qualities which his fellow Hellenes had 
 worked out in their religion, their civic polity 
 and their art. Plato's abstract notions of 
 Wisdom, Fortitude, Temperance, Justice, 
 were another form the Greek mind took of 
 poetically endowing every object with a soul, 
 
PLATO 289 
 
 a personality, of forming gods as it liad 
 formed them in its childhood before Homer's 
 day. 
 
 His theory is also pervasively human, it 
 has been remarked, inasmuch as it expresses 
 a tendency of the human mind to bunch to- 
 gether qualities of similarity and refer them 
 to a type or model. The universe of Ideas 
 which the mystic Plato set forth became the 
 Logos, the indwelling life and truth of Philo 
 and of the Fourth Gospel. 
 
 A soul animates the world, and this world- 
 soul is the only begotten, iiovoyevij^, imma- 
 nent. Supreme Deity is maker of the world- 
 soul. After the same model deity fashioned 
 the world-body. The cosmos or well-ordered 
 universe, becomes thus an organism, "Di- 
 vine Child." 
 
 In creating this world "God was good," 
 says Plato, and "in one who is good there 
 never is envy: so being far from envy he 
 wished that all things become as like himself 
 as possible." "He set the soul in the midst 
 of the body . . . and set forth a sphere ^* re- 
 
 ^* Because the sphere is the most perfect of forms, 
 the universe, most perfect of existences, must be 
 spherical. 
 
290 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 volving in a sphere, by reason of its own vir- 
 tue powerful over itself, and needing no other, 
 but being sufficient to itself for acquaintance 
 and friend." 
 
 The world-soul was the vice-gerent of the 
 Creator, like the Logos of Heraclitus spoken 
 of on foregoing page 148. The creator was 
 the "Father," "Generator," the Highest 
 God. ' ' To discover the Maker and Father of 
 the Whole is a task, and if once he were dis- 
 covered, he could not be spoken to men." 
 That is, All-Good and Primordial Principle 
 is too remote from the common mind to be ex- 
 plained. 
 
 The created gods, receiving from their 
 great demiurge the immortal part, fashioned 
 man and the perishable part of his soul. In 
 every human soul, said Plato, is a divine ele- 
 ment of the Supreme God, "the eye of the 
 soul. " It is the highest and most divine part 
 of man, a sovereign daemon who "lifts us 
 from earth to our kinship with heaven, since 
 we are not of earth but of heaven by birth." 
 Greatest honor is borne the soul by making 
 it better, and love of truth, of all excellences 
 of character, is first, and love of justice. 
 Virtue in and for itself is the highest human 
 
PLATO 291 
 
 good. "Every soul of man, by its very na- 
 ture, has seen the things that really are, other- 
 wise it would not have come into this form of 
 life. To rise from things here to the recol- 
 lection of those is not easy for every soul." 
 "Even in Hfe that which makes each one of 
 us to be what we are is the soul; and when 
 we are dead, the deathless being of us, which 
 is called the soul, goes on her way to other 
 gods, that to them she may give account." 
 
 As in the old Orphic speculation, bodily 
 desires are weights and hindrances to the im- 
 prisoned soul of man eager for release. 
 Man's life is all a preparation for death. 
 Of its future life with the gods the soul has 
 had visions in the archetypes. There are 
 two other places of the future world — ^Ach- 
 eron, the place of impure souls and Tartarus, 
 or Hell. 
 
 The beautiful is that which pertains to ex- 
 cellence of soul or body ; the ugly that which 
 pertains to defects and vices. This identifies 
 aesthetics with ethics, and puts art as a sub- 
 server to morality. Because of the suscep- 
 tibility of humans to that about them — to the 
 influence of environment — from his perfect 
 state Plato would banish all art not edifying, 
 
292 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 not mastering the subject to political pur- 
 poses. In common with, other disciples of 
 Socrates he inherited a puritan asceticism 
 and taught a Dorian depreciation of lighter, 
 seductive externals. 
 
 The state is but the individual writ large 
 — and here we have Plato expressing the 
 sympathies of the Pythagorean brotherhood. 
 The disorganization of the state from mal- 
 formed individualism — the disintegration of 
 a state's life which Plato was witnessing at 
 Athens — ^he would heal by subjecting the in- 
 dividual to the best interest of all, to corpo- 
 rate sentiment. For his perfect state Sparta 
 or Lacedsemon, where had persisted a mili- 
 tary organization associated with the victory 
 of northern invaders, gave Plato the outline 
 — here again in the ideal state, as in the archi- 
 tecture of the Acropolis and in the religious 
 drama, the northern Dorian genius of the 
 Hellenes dominating the southern Ionian 
 character. Eulers should be filled with "the 
 divine love" of "just and judicious action." 
 "War-men or military are the armed con- 
 science and will of the state, and handicrafts- 
 men and husbandmen who produce the great, 
 supporting base. For this pattern state ' ' an 
 
PLATO 293 
 
 imitation of the best and most beautiful life," 
 Plato laid down rules concerning the "divi- 
 sion of powers," the independence of the 
 superior political functions, which descended 
 to and influenced the work of our forefather- 
 makers of the Constitution of the United 
 States. 
 
 Conceptions of a state which prevailed at 
 Athens in its marvelous fifty years, that of 
 Pericles reported by Thucydides, that of 
 ^schylus and Sophocles, and of Pheidias and 
 Ictinus as shown by their works, regard the 
 city not only as a dwelling place of safety 
 from enemies, but also as a medium through 
 which may be practiced refined ideals of life 
 — ^not for the sake of life, but for the sake, 
 said a pupil of Plato, of the noble life. This 
 pupil, Aristotle, who at a time when the Greek 
 city-state was perishing compactly organized 
 the scattered material of existing constitu- 
 tions of one hundred and fifty-eight Greek 
 cities, became the founder of comparative po- 
 litical science. ' ' Man is by nature a citizen, ' ' 
 said this theorizer of the realities the Greek 
 cities had lived. A citizen he defined by the 
 right to make laws and administer justice. 
 The state is a natural institution necessary 
 
294 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 first from the needs of man, and second that 
 he may live his best, complete life. It is an 
 organism, each part of which is fitted for its 
 function. It seeks the common good of all 
 by building character and intellect, by the 
 exercise of human personality. Formed to 
 make life secure, said Aristotle, the state 
 continues that men may live the highest ac- 
 tivities, both civic and super-civic or divine. 
 All education is but preparation for some 
 worthy activity. The ideal state educates its 
 people for its institutions. Only in this way 
 can its institutions be preserved. 
 
 Upon what js Plato's greatness grounded? 
 Answers have been many, not including, in 
 summaries, a literary art that is an unvarying 
 marvel. Upon his all-illuminative sugges- 
 tiveness ; upon his vitality that meets with an 
 interpretation the spiritual phase of gener- 
 ations since his day — even of to-day; upon 
 the fact that his mysticism, his illuminism has 
 not been at war with the scientific spirit, but, 
 says a disciple, has rather saved it from 
 aridity and worship of word and form. In 
 warming, softening and lighting Plato has the 
 all-inclusiveness of the Teacher of Christian- 
 ity. 
 
PINNACLES OF THE GREEK ASCENT 295 
 
 The Socratic solution of life is that life 
 should be an energizing, an ardent enquiry, an 
 unswerving seeking for the eternal Good 
 and Beautiful and True — ever a seeking and 
 a beholding, never a satisfied possession. 
 The solution celebrates the maturity of man. 
 The deeper we see the more conscious we 
 are of a great deficiency. "We must nurse no 
 illusion. Only seek and fear not. "It is 
 wrong to do injustice in return for injustice, 
 or to inflict ill on any man, whatever we may 
 suffer at his hands," said Socrates a month 
 before he drank the poison to which he was 
 sentenced at his trial. In time we shall have 
 forgotten self in the presence of the blazing 
 universe of God. When self is forgotten the 
 end is attained. 
 
 In Socrates and Plato we have come to the 
 pinnacle of the Greek ascent. The energy of 
 the genius of Hellas is great enough to over- 
 come the hostility of nature and fate. Its 
 pronunciamento is: — Mediation between the 
 soul and its external world is in a wise and 
 strong self -limitation. Aidos, acdwc, reverent 
 fear had now become sophrosyne, aaxppoauvi], 
 temperate self-restraint based on reverence, 
 health of soul, soundness of intellect. 
 
296 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 sense of one's own "worth. Like aidos, re- 
 plete with religious feeling, dominating 
 earlier peoples, sophrosyne subjugated ex- 
 uberance, guarded against excess and made 
 for moderation, self-control. 
 
 To measure the height attained by the 
 genius of this third great epoch of the Hel- 
 lenes is impossible. The same marvelous 
 perfection we see everywhere in its works. 
 It was mother of the completed idea of civil 
 .liberty, bearing witness in its output that 
 democracy need not welter in commonness 
 but may in its polity do the mightiest of 
 deeds and with its thought set out the might- 
 iest of works — this age of Pheidias in sculp- 
 ture, of ^schylus and Sophocles and Eurip- 
 ides and Aristophanes in poetry, and of Soc- 
 rates in ethics, in the conduct of life. The 
 depth of its thought and art are unfathomable, 
 living with the waters of the eternal spirit. 
 We may exhaust all clear, calm and luminous 
 images and not overpraise its majesty and 
 splendor. 
 
 A consciousness of the meaning and po- 
 tence of their work to later nations, and for 
 generations to come, must have been alive 
 among those Hellenes and urging them to ac- 
 
PINNACLE OF THE GREEK ASCENT 297 
 
 complish the impossible. The lucid and per- 
 suasive speech of Pericles quoted on forego- 
 ing page 15, the reasons Herodotus gave 
 for his writing, on foregoing pages 250 and 
 251, Thucydides in his history, bring us evr- 
 dence of their feeling for the future and their 
 heirs. They were infused with a conquering 
 activity. They had the penetrative percep- 
 tion and power, the energy they said was di- 
 vine — that not only engenders the idea that 
 leads to action, but makes the thought itself 
 all-conquering, — that quality called damon- 
 isch: 
 
 "Je mehr du fiihlst ein Mensch zu sein 
 Desto atmlicher bist du den Gottem." 
 
DECADENCE OF THE GREEK 
 SPIRIT 
 
Die Gesundheit und Daur eines Staats beruhet nieht 
 auf dem Punkt seiner hoehsten Cultur sondem auf 
 einem weisen oder gliicklichen Gleichgewicht seiner 
 lebendig-wirkenden Krafte. . . . 
 
 Aber das haben alle Gattungen menschlieher Auf- 
 klarung gemein, dass jede zu einem Punkt der Vollkom- 
 menheit strebet, der, wenn er durch einen Zusammenbang 
 gliicklicher Umstande bier oder dort erreicbt ist, sicb 
 weder ewig erbalten noch auf der Stelle wiederkommen 
 kann, sondern eine abnehmende Reihe anfangt. — Hee- 
 DEE, in Ideen sur Philosophie der Geschichte der Mensch- 
 heit. 
 
 As societies consolidate tbey pass through a pro- 
 found intellectual change. Energy ceases to find vent 
 through the imagination, and takes the form of capital; 
 hence as civilizations advance' the imaginative tempera- 
 ment tends to disappear, while the economic instinct is 
 fostered, and thus substantially new varieties of men 
 come to possess the world. — Beooks Adams, in The Law 
 of Civilization and Decay. 
 
 300 
 
DECADENCE OF THE GREEK 
 SPIRIT 
 
 CAUSES OF DETERIORATION 
 
 • Measueed in tlie great processes of time 
 the age of perfect ideals in Hellas, and the' 
 concrete embodying of its ideals, is as mo- 
 mentary as it is sublime. Still beautiful and 
 affluent the spirit of Greece declined. Equilib- 
 rium of powers, the golden mean of avoid-^ 
 ance of extremes, the harmony of aptitudes 
 which rests upon the predominance of the; 
 highest and subordination of the lower — 
 delicacy of the senses and susceptibility to 
 impression that had led to the Hellene's sense 
 of limitation, to his abhorrence of excess ; 
 feeling of the balanced use of all he perceived 
 whether in his art or in his life, his lucid, 
 vivid singleness in working means to ends — •_ 
 fell away. After the depleting war between 
 Athens and Sparta there was little balance 
 between the soul and body of Hellas. The 
 fundamental relations upon which her spirit 
 
 301 
 
302 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 had advanced for perhaps a thousand years, 
 she had lost. A cleavage between the thinker 
 and people had come; thought was now be- 
 coming the possession of the solitary, holding 
 little active relation to social and political 
 life. The constructive vigor of Hellas seemed 
 near its end. 
 
 What led to the decadence? 
 
 Mere reaction, suggests one : The ideal 
 was too higli for the average citizen to make 
 a reality. No life could maintain such a 
 height. Its competitioti, its very intensity, 
 must in time react, in politics to division and 
 disintegration from factional strife ; in art to 
 softness and enervation. The decay of Greek 
 civilization was due to a weakening of the 
 moral fiber of the Greek people. 
 
 Exhausting the blood of the nation by ex- 
 tinction of the strongest in spirit and body, 
 the best, in interminable, interrcity strife^ 
 especially in the Peloponnesian war, says a 
 second, — just as the progressive energy of 
 nations' blood has been depleted in many an- 
 other time in later histon^ ; as in the death of 
 strong men of imperial Rome in her extensive 
 wars, in the sweeping away of strong men of 
 England in Marston Moor and Naseby, when 
 
WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 303 
 
 men of Scotland, ' ' the Flowers of the Forest, 
 were a'wede away" at Flodden, in the death 
 of strong men of America at Bunker Hill and 
 Saratoga. 
 
 Physical^ forces of the Hellenes may have 
 beeinnsidiously. sapped, a third avers : Ma- 
 laria becoming endemic about four hundred 
 years before Christ, destroyed initiative force 
 and disintegrated the energy of the people, 
 in such ways as the disease has devitalized 
 races to-day. There is proof that during the 
 Peloponnes^ian war^ after the plague, Athens 
 suffered a considerable languor and indeter- 
 mination and unwillingness to make effort to , 
 gain back her losses. Exuberant strength 
 she showed at times later, but it was inter- 
 mittent. Malaria, slowly inrooting, might 
 have led to modifications, to invisible changes 
 of the ideas of the people that occurred in the 
 last quarter of the fifth century. 
 
 Again, says another, simplest economics 
 may have affected conditions — deficiency of 
 the home food supply. The population of 
 Athens had expanded, and imports must have 
 grown increasingly difficult during the Pelo- 
 ponnesian war and afterwards. Abnormal 
 economic conditions doubtless had had much 
 
304 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 to do witli the political unrest. Able-bodied 
 slaves competed in manufacture with the 
 landless, poorer citizen. Property and its 
 possession underlay a notable part of the 
 political antagonism of Hellas. 
 
 Weight of numbers had at last a victory in 
 the decay of Hellas. Compared with the 
 hordes about them the Hellenes, we have said, 
 were a handful. They had always been fight- 
 ing against odds. Their wonderful work in 
 politics, in ethics, in physical science and 
 philosophy, in poetry and prose, in architec- 
 ture and tectonic arts they had done with 
 subversion as a possibility ever threatening. 
 They had swept the disintegrator back when 
 he came in military floods. They had unified, 
 assimilated, absorbed, foreign elements and 
 influences to an amazing degree. The name 
 of Hellas had gone afar. Hellas was the 
 light, the glory of beauty and freedom, to 
 which the oppressed and maimed of other 
 lands, and also the adventurers and traders 
 of other lands, had turned. Foreign men 
 poured in. Foreign ideas, foreign habits, 
 overrode the earnest, poised life of the earlier 
 generations. The incomers lessened the peo- 
 ple's regard for ancestral custom, for race 
 
WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 305 
 
 law and race legend, and, strongest sanction 
 to race stability, race religion and fertility. 
 Race persistence declined. 
 
 Hellenism fell at last before numbers, an 
 inert and superstition-fed mind, and before 
 individualism developing itself awry, inca- 
 pable of unity and of its trusteeship Pericles 
 had bespoken. The G-reeks' frugal, modest 
 self-reliance, their power of doing without, 
 gave way to a form of individualism that de- 
 feated itself in profligate luxury and windy 
 education. In place of an ardent public 
 spirit there grew indifference and stagnation. 
 The social mind had ceased to idealize liberty, 
 and to worship it and strive for its perpetu- 
 ation. It had become estranged from itself. 
 Loyalty to and reverence for the historic past 
 fell away, and also devotion to state which 
 had made their heritage sacred, a gift worth 
 passing on. 
 
 Patriotism, especially among the prosper- 
 ous and corrupt, gave place to a cosmopolitan- 
 ism and an economic existence so poor as to 
 proclaim devotion to self its sole end. Per- 
 sonal ambition, narrow aims, culture, sup- 
 planted the ardor of heroic deeds, great 
 causes, and made preferable life in personal 
 
30e THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 ease and luxury. The individual settled into 
 pursuit of what his short-sightedness deemed 
 his own separate interests. It was a day of 
 the ascendency of the self-seeking type of 
 man. The high altruism that distinguished 
 Greece in the Persian wars had reacted to 
 egotism. False individualism had developed 
 to a loss of public spirit. The far-sighted 
 sense of the unity of individual and state 
 that had glorified the citizen in the earlier 
 city-state was now darkened by a supposed 
 antagonism between the interests of the indi- 
 vidual and of the state. Certain Hellenes 
 seized opportunity for wealth and power and 
 destroyed the balance of a democracy — at 
 Athens was "contention to rule," said Plato, 
 competition for offices and honors. The 
 weaker could not withstand the force of the 
 interested strong. In larger laws of biology 
 even states suffer senile decay. 
 
 A saying of Plato that a change of mode 
 of music indicates change in the laws is quoted 
 on foregoing page 198. The rule fits other 
 arts also. Into the drama Euripides had in- 
 troduced clean, sharp individualization. And 
 in sculpture the worker was, in these years, 
 not embodying national or state ideals, char- 
 
WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 307 
 
 acter, moral sentiment, the etlios of Aristotle. 
 Eather, as Praxiteles in carving the sensuous 
 beauty of Aphrodite, he was portraying, and 
 with more individuality in technic and more 
 human feeling and character, divinities whose 
 gifts were for the enjoyment of the individual 
 citizen. 
 
 Even the unifying religious cults, which 
 socialized the individual soul repledging it 
 to the soul of the people — these lost their 
 hold. Supernatural intervention of supreme 
 powers in the affairs of men was a part of the 
 creed of every Hellene. After the disasters 
 of the Peloponnesian war, gods who had per. 
 mitted destruction of the political leadership 
 of Athens received scantier courtesies. Ed 
 ligion, as we now intimated, had in many 
 functions been devotion to the city-state em- 
 bodying or projecting the united conscious- 
 ness of the people. Private forms of wor- 
 ship, finding in the happiness of another life 
 consolations for sufferings in this, in these 
 times grew apace. That toleration, that 
 liberality of the democratic sentiment at 
 Athens which permitted all discourse and in- 
 tellectual disquisition, that respect for the 
 individual's dissent in opinion and manner to 
 
308 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 whicli Pericles refers in Ms speech on fore- 
 going page 225 — ^wMch had allowed the blame- 
 less quest of Socrates and his dwelling on 
 special promptings from his divine voice — 
 right of free speech, love of fullest liberty, the 
 freedom from restraint that had permitted 
 the spirit to go unnumbered ways in the wan- 
 derings of thought, in political aspiration, in 
 rehgious fathomings, in philosophical spec- 
 ulation, in analyses of the moral aspects of 
 man — lent unchallenged opportunity to de- 
 moralizing incomers. 
 
 Thucydides and Euripides and others of 
 the day had voiced a blighting skepticism in 
 respect to the gods, and miracles, and "proph- 
 ecies and oracles and the like which ruin 
 men by the hopes they inspire in them." 
 They had carried disbelief further than it had 
 gone in the sayings of credulous Herodotus 
 and his generation. The funeral oration of 
 Pericles, pronounced in the year 431 and re- 
 ported by Thucydides, has, it is noted, no al- 
 lusion to popular religious myths, although 
 it glows with the amethystine light of a 
 people's grief. Their religion, originally a 
 living thing, had hardened to a mass of for- 
 mulas and ceremonies made impressive by 
 
WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 309 
 
 riches of tlie state and by association with 
 the race's art. A ritual expressing feeling of 
 foregone generations deadened warming and 
 buoyant intimacy with emotions of their day. 
 The people turned elsewhere, to other associ- 
 ations, for exercise of their religious con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 Emotion defeated reason. Their old-time 
 faith — that a lucid, strong intelligence, self- 
 reliant, sustained by energy and directness 
 of vision is master of all circumstances — ^had 
 gone. Their rationalism had fallen, and at 
 times before insidious, infiltering currents of 
 faiths that nullified the basal principles and 
 facts of Greek life, and before miasmatic 
 superstitions which masses of slaves and trad- 
 ing foreigners seized as they poured into Hel- 
 las, or perchance brought with them. Greece 
 had labored to educate a corrupt world and 
 was herself led to corrupt the ideals she 
 sought to universalize. 
 
 Worship of the gods, we have seen, had 
 been an ancestral usage. The gods incar- 
 nated race feeling and race thinking. Men 
 and women who united in worship showed 
 their loyalty to their race and to their state 
 which sanctioned and set forth the liturgy. 
 
310 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Not to join in the ritual meant disloyalty to 
 state and race. Their worship asserted their 
 common inheritance and oneness. When the 
 worship lost hold on the people their sense of 
 oneness in blood lessened. But long after 
 faith in their religious values died, festivals 
 instituted by the state held the attention of 
 the populace by the splendor of their cere- 
 monies, their poetical imagery, the beauty of 
 their ritual in form and color, and by associ- 
 ation with the Hellenic race-traditions and 
 the music of the Hellenic speech. The Athe- 
 nians, we have said, were ever markedly given 
 to religious cults. Even when Paul spoke on 
 the Areopagus centuries after their national- 
 ism had gone, he told the generation of his 
 day that he saw they were a very god-fearing 
 folk, die 8etacdacfioveaTi:pou<; bfid^ Oecopw.-^ 
 
 1 More than a hundred years after Paul, Pausanias 
 wrote of an altar to Mercy in the market place of 
 Athens — "to whom, although of all gods he is the most 
 helpful in human life and in the mutations of fortune, 
 the Athenians are the only Hellenes who pay honor." 
 "They are more pious than other folks," the old Greek 
 traveler continues, "for they have an altar to Reverent 
 Tear, and to Rumor, and to Impulse. It is clear that 
 to those who are more pious than others there will be a 
 proportionate share of good fortune." 
 
WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 311 
 
 Attendance at and glorying in the national 
 games and, at Delphi and Olympia, devotion 
 to the divinities of the shrines, had been, we 
 have seen, a general expression of the Hel- 
 lenes' national unity. But even the pan- 
 Hellenic festivals which had had so great a 
 share of the Greeks' spontaneity in thought 
 and joy in action, and had once fairly voiced 
 the profounder spirit of Greek religion and 
 Greek politics, passed from the ideal of phys- 
 ical strength united with grace in friendly 
 competition. No longer did balanced bodily 
 excellence and vigor, refined by love of beauty 
 of form and religious feehng, bespeak na- 
 tional life. Now athletes were classmen, mon- 
 strously developed by exercise, set apart, 
 over-specialized. The games were coming to 
 be commercialized athletic shows, where hu- 
 man beings, over-developed to the degree of 
 a mechanical instrument, made sport an end 
 in itself and trafficked for victory — ^where, as 
 popular heroes, they exhibited their tempo- 
 rary strength to under-developed, unath- 
 letic applauders filling the seats of an amphi- 
 theater, spectators themselves indisposed to 
 effort. 
 
 With the Greeks, as with a sometime later 
 
312 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 nation, tlie very core of its formative energy 
 was a religiosity, that exalted power of the 
 puritan in an other-worldliness which, expands 
 his democracy in this life — the strength of 
 the worshiper who is a priest as well as 
 child of his divinity. Sacerdotalism eats out 
 the heart of a democracy. When a priest 
 caste grew, even in so indefinite lines as in 
 later Hellas, when authority sought to sup- 
 port itself and credulous practices flourished 
 among the people, a weakening of the indi- 
 vidual set in. That in his old age, writing 
 his "Laws," Plato inveighs with all his elo- 
 quence against infidehties, the heresy of dis- 
 belief in the Greek gods, in their providence 
 and care, in their incorruptibility, doubtless 
 brings us light upon actual conditions before 
 his eyes. The foundations of the later Hel- 
 lenes ' religion were the ideas and sensibilities 
 of their ancestors. Eace associations had 
 built upon them, and when they were broken 
 or displaced nothing of inherent religious 
 value took their place. 
 
 The last stages of the Greek spirit are now 
 clear, and also the pathos of its fall. Sub- 
 version of the power of Athens at the end 
 of the Peloponnesian war left the world of 
 
WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 313 
 
 Hellas incapable of thrusting back inraiders. 
 Disintegration of her spiritual and self-re^ 
 liant strength opened the way for any well- 
 knit, crafty and ambitious foreigner to pos- 
 sess himself of her people. "The man of 
 Macedon," Philip, answered the call and 
 fitted the occasion. Among the Hellenes, 
 sycophants, that is manufacturers of false 
 and frivolous indictments, demagogues pre- 
 tending to represent the people but in reality 
 self-seekers, and foreign adventurers, out- 
 balanced the patriots. The people armed for 
 their country's defense and met death in bat- 
 tle, says their epitaph composed by Demos- 
 thenes, that the Hellenes might not bear the 
 hateful yoke of slavery. 
 
 The progression of the Greek spirit ends 
 wholly with the establishment of Macedonian 
 supremacy in 338 before Christ. Liberty 
 fled in the last mutterings of Demosthenes' 
 thunder against the barter with Philip of 
 Macedon. The Greek mind stifled under dic- 
 tation from Pella. Its creative activity 
 ceased. "Far-seeing Zeus," said the peo- 
 ple's ancient Homer, "takes away half the 
 virtue of a man the day when slavery closes 
 down upon him," 
 
314 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 There succeeded a nation of slaves in civic 
 life and savans. To lavish money upon per- 
 sonal enjoyment Greeks of the great ages had 
 esteemed vulgar, inhuman, un-Hellenic. To 
 see in the luxury of private life a compensa- 
 tion for the loss of political freedom they had 
 judged the choice of slaves. But in Hellas 
 this now happened. Demosthenes, and other 
 orators, tell of the show and extravagance of 
 the self-seeking men of their day compared 
 with the simple living of the Athenians who 
 had built Athens with a magnificence and 
 splendor no future time could surpass. The 
 moral basis of the national greatness had 
 fallen away. More than half a century after 
 the victory at Charonsea various of the cities 
 of Hellas recovered independence and formed 
 a loose federation — each city exercising the 
 old Greek autonomy in its social and peculiar 
 affairs, but a federated or common govern- 
 ment for purposes touching their nationalism. 
 The life of the league was brief. 
 
 A virile, unconquerable people enlightened 
 with a social quality, a world-loyalty, never 
 before embodied, prepossessed with the quest 
 of the ethical values of life, aflame with the 
 invisible spiritual energy of a religious eri- 
 
WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 315 
 
 thusiasm, zealous with an ardor to system- 
 atize knowledge, gifted with a mental supple- 
 ness and penetration into all problems, of 
 imparalleled art impulse, idealists, doers of 
 deeds and thinkers of great thoughts fell be- 
 fore irrationalism even to destructive eco- 
 nomics in their state, and an unnaturahsm 
 that forgot essential race conceptions in their 
 church, before mere subtleties and»a sophis- 
 tical making the worse the better reason. 
 There came a man who did "plough with a 
 silver ploughshare." Abroad in the land 
 was the siren-song of self-indulgence and the 
 luxury lightness yearns for. 
 
 Doric puritanism and its race traditions 
 and resolute bravery no longer cleaned Hel- 
 lenic air. In place of spiritual height deeply 
 rooted in race ethics, instead of an ancient 
 simplicity and solidity there was an ever-in- 
 creasing frivolity, reacting egotism and pleas- 
 ures. Possibly we may say the Hellenes 
 were victims of their own versatility. That 
 is, their progressive energy, the strength of 
 their creative and inventive faculties may so 
 far have overpowered force of tradition that 
 they no longer preserved this second conserv- 
 ative force in active civilization. Their culti- 
 
316 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 vation and its vast creative power had lost 
 balance. 
 
 Their disintegration, as we have said, was 
 helped by tendencies of disparate and unre- 
 lated stocks of the population, and perhaps 
 by the old, fluid, solvent, ^gean people's 
 blood that could have little intellectual com- 
 prehension of and emotional sympathy with 
 the organization and administration with 
 which their old-time, conquering, northern 
 Achseans, energetic idealists, men of action, 
 were instinct, — ^by means of which organi- 
 zation alone the Hellenic states could have 
 strength to endure. 
 
 Those peoples coming from the north, 
 whom Homer had sung as Achaeans, whose 
 greatest inroad we know as Dorian, had pos- 
 sibly spent themselves. Amalgamated with 
 the multitudes of the milder ^gean folk 
 whom they had originally subdued, to whose 
 civilization they had given order and force 
 and breadth, whose art impulse the stimulus 
 of their energy in other fields of human action 
 had impelled to output, — these may have 
 been finally overcome by the larger stream of 
 blood. Indolence, fondness for pleasure, ac- 
 quiescence in whatever power constituted it- 
 
WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 317 
 
 self master, may have been evidence of a 
 subjugated race's complete conquest of its 
 old-time victor. 
 
 That the spirit of a people is moral, vigor- 
 ous, virtuous, while it is absorbed in realizing 
 itself, in giving to its purposes objective ex- 
 istence, is almost a truism. "When it accom- 
 plishes the end of its generic, spiritual life, 
 it ceases its activities and passes from ma- 
 turity to age, unless it originates or takes on 
 a new purpose and so a new spirit. The Hel- 
 lenes had ceased to win their own spiritual 
 life and carry it further. "The gods bring 
 to pass much that is beyond all hope," sings 
 Euripides, "and the expected does not hap- 
 pen. But Grod has discovered a way for 
 the unexpected. So did this matter turn 
 out." 
 
 For events in history seemingly more un- 
 fortunate for our human kind than the over- 
 whelming of the Greek life and the spirit 
 impelling it, we must turn to the quenching, 
 amid the chaos of peoples that marked the 
 patristic age, of the moral impulses of early 
 Christianity — ^when, says a late writer, the 
 ethical enthusiasm, the insight into human 
 needs of its Teacher were subordinated to a 
 
318 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 system of doctrines generated in decadent 
 Greek dialectics, misty oriental symbolism, 
 metaphysical myths and Jewish dogmas. 
 
 But even now, after her subversion, through 
 what she had already accomplished, Greece 
 entered upon another work of human con- 
 sciousness. Dying she lived for the world; 
 it " is not quickened except it die. ' ' In giving 
 up her exclusiveness and nationality she en- 
 tered more immediately upon a broader in- 
 fluence — the evangehzing all sequent cen- 
 turies. Her radiant spirit had put forth a 
 perfect blossom. Asiatic and Italian myr- 
 iads were now, and in centuries to come, to 
 bear its seed to all lands. Great fusion of 
 peoples resulted from the leadership of Philip 
 and Alexander of Macedon, and soon after 
 Alexander's troublous day it was hard to 
 draw the line between Greek and barbarian. 
 Greek art was now become fit for art's small 
 talk; Greek literature widespread, but im- 
 itative, precise, learned ; Greek philosophy at 
 times morosely factional and distorted, but 
 still seminal. 
 
 Isocrates had said that the Hellenes' lan- 
 guage was a matter no longer of race but 
 intelligence. Already the speech bearing its 
 
AN EVANGEL TO SEQUENT CENTURIES 319 
 
 precious treasure had so made its way that 
 the stranger, aping the child of light, might 
 gain or externally assume an Hellenic intel- 
 lectual view-point. The oriental translated 
 his name into Greek — ^just as at a later day 
 he translated it into Greco-Latin, and as he 
 often translates it into English to-day. Dur- 
 ing the next centuries, upon each new con- 
 queror, the spirit of Greece seized hold till 
 the whole Eoman world became Hellenized; 
 until in Constantinople Eoman imperialism 
 itself sought to gain its strength in a Greek 
 foundation. 
 
 The free-playing life of the people out of 
 which Greek oratory and Greek dialectics and 
 love of discussion had grown, had passed 
 away. But power of speech and of culti- 
 vated expression still abode. Studies of, and 
 acquaintance with, the ideas and literature 
 of earlier Greek times now came to fulfill the 
 ideal of education — that from which our ideal 
 of education to-day has by direct event and 
 tradition descended. Socrates, Plato and 
 Aristotle had developed a complete philos- 
 ophy of education, which passed from Greece 
 south to Africa, and westward where the 
 Eomans adopted it and fitted it to their needs. 
 
320 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 From them the philosophy spread to Teutonic 
 and Celtic populations of the north. The 
 Eenaissance revived and expanded the ideal 
 and passed it on, till we find in treatises of our 
 English Milton and Locke and other writers 
 principles set forth by the works of Xeno- 
 phon, Plato and Aristotle. 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS COMMON TO HELLENES 
 AND AMERICANS 
 
 The spirit that animated the Hellenes is 
 unique. We do not find its repetition. All 
 parallels are imperfect. Of late years Japan 
 has at times faintly suggested the Hellenic 
 feeling towards race unity, and in its rapidity 
 of development the all-assimilative, eager, 
 adaption of ideas of the Greeks. Also in the 
 ethics of Bushido the Hellenic sense of self- 
 limitation; and in art a plasticity of concep- 
 tion and expression. In Japan, too, we have 
 modem likeness to the old Greek solidarity 
 of the group. But in its repression of indi- 
 vidualism Japan is distinctly non-Hellenic. 
 The world is grown large. What moderns 
 strive to achieve is unwieldy. Our outwork- 
 ings have not proportion and grace. Nor 
 
CERTAIN LIKENESSES 321 
 
 have they, save rarely, the consciousness of 
 Grod-given mission, as with the old Hellenes. 
 
 "Eternal Youths of History" the Greeks 
 have variously been called. In one of his 
 latest works, "Timseus," Plato makes an 
 Egyptian priest say to Solon, "You Hellenes 
 are never anything but children . . . you are 
 all young; there is no opinion handed down 
 among you by ancient tradition, nor any sci- 
 ence hoary with age." "Children!" ex- 
 claims Europe at the naive individualism of 
 our fellow country-men and women, and 
 their unproclaimed lack of background and 
 race-tradition. 
 
 To those old Hellenes Americans have a 
 certain likeness. They are not wholly for- 
 eign, wholly strange. Similarities of each 
 people the Dean of Greek Letters in Amer- 
 ica has named along lines similar to these : — 
 Buoyancy and elasticity of spirits, quick per- 
 ception, straightness and keenness of vision, 
 directness of action, energy, audacity, inven- 
 tiveness, a versatile many sidedness, mobility, 
 universality. Another quality of the Hellenic 
 temperament an English scholar has dwelt 
 upon — a natural expansiveness, a wish to 
 enter into kindly relations with those one 
 
822 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 meets, to exchange, one might say, a pleasant 
 word with the stranger in a forest roadway, 
 to utter a fleeting emotion or thought to 
 chance passers-by. That human touch also 
 is like the Americans' — doubtless in each 
 people founded on the colonists' environ- 
 ment, a singleness of purpose and sim- 
 plicity of life that must be with the pioneer, 
 a subordination of the complex and organized 
 which Americans have to this time success- 
 fully kept. 
 
 The Hellenes lived their life, somebody has 
 said, much as we Americans should have 
 lived it. A puritan-blooded American from 
 Kansas City or Minneapolis, walking through 
 the Piraeus of the fourth century before 
 Christ, and onward to and in Athens, would, 
 if the high-pitched idealism of the man could 
 speak from his tailored body, doubtless be 
 hailed as a possible Hellene from the shadows 
 of ^tna, or from some northern town. In 
 the instincts of his soul, whether American 
 or Hellene, the world is fresh. All is new, 
 all is plastic. There is no exhaustion, no 
 world-weariness. No sentimental melan- 
 cholia, no hazy inanities and faded sestheti- 
 cism. He joys in a mental dexterity, a gift 
 
CERTAIN LIKENESSES 323 
 
 of bringing to one supreme effort all energies 
 of body and will, putting heart and soul into 
 whatever task lie may for the time essay, 
 ready appliance of the Opportunity that the 
 altar in the Olympia stadium prompted. A 
 characteristic of his is what Thucydides said 
 belonged to the Athenians — to get through 
 the matters they have undertaken is their 
 holiday, and nothing to do is as disagreeable 
 as wearisome occupation. 
 
 The old Hellenes had not only the pe- 
 culiar endowments of their race, but an added 
 characteristic distinguished them — namely, a 
 more nervous energy. So Americans, to-day. 
 They had the predilection of youth for ad- 
 venture, for change associated with risk, that 
 derring-do, that courage and endurance that 
 lights the countenance of eternal youth. 
 Then, too, the love of being first, an appetite 
 for success, "always to be best and excel- 
 ling others," said Homer, was a fertile Hel- 
 lenic characteristic. "Contention (competi- 
 tion) stirs a man to work even though he be 
 inactive," sang Hesiod. "For any one in 
 lack of work, when he sees another, a rich 
 man, he speeds himself to plough, and to plant 
 and manage well his house; neighbor vies 
 
324 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 with neighbor who is hastening to wealth. 
 Good is this contention. Potter grudges pot- 
 ter, and craftsman, craftsman ; and beggar is 
 jealous of beggar and poet of poet." This 
 quality grows with what it feeds upon, but 
 remains insatiable. To it we may ascribe 
 somewhat of the excelling greatness of the 
 Hellenes, and in some measure their unhappy 
 fall. 
 
 In all democracies, it has been noted, open, 
 noisy applause expressing public gratitude 
 for service to fellow-citizens is generally es- 
 teemed the desirable of honors. No other 
 manifestation of deference and admiration 
 seems so highly prized. The more impres- 
 sible the people of the democracy, the in- 
 tenser the sentiment, the louder the applause. 
 The greater also the liability of the acclaimed 
 to a demoralized self-estimation, to subver- 
 sion of judgment and to ultimate corruption. 
 
 To their political leaders the Hellenic de- 
 mocracies gave profuse rewards of material 
 substance. The Greek character was quick, 
 frank, sympathetic, impressible. Accept- 
 ance of the gift witnessed consciousness in 
 the men that they, too, rated at a price their 
 patriotism. But when a leader as poised as 
 
CERTAIN LIKENESSES 325 
 
 Pericles had gained firm hold on the people, 
 or as later, Demosthenes, such men used their 
 power honorably. 
 
 Another present-day psychological inter- 
 est also pertained among this sensitive peo- 
 ple. The Greeks were given to see the im- 
 portance in action, and in public affairs, of 
 what they called pheme, <pwVj Kumor, a god- 
 dess of mysterious origin who impels men, 
 they imaginatively said, a subtle force for 
 which our Enghsh has no name, or at best 
 a misrepresenting one — the force that makes 
 the collective mind, the primitive habit of 
 thinking in group unity, the gregarious sym- 
 pathy, which, contagious, quick to act on sug- 
 gestion, forgetful of self, forgetful also of 
 calm reason, sometimes lacking higher moral 
 qualities, by the crude collective mentation 
 or emotion of group life submerges individ- 
 ual will and forms at a crisis the common, 
 spontaneous impulse of a multitude, an all 
 dominating social will. They recognized the 
 mysterious unit in the days of Homer, In 
 greatly enlarged phases this vox dei became 
 the vox populi of the inspiration after Ther- 
 mopylae, and drove to the upbuilding of 
 Athens. In that city stood an altar to 
 
326 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Eumor, The city's jury courts, accustom- 
 ing the people to seek and balance opposing 
 views, the habit of public speaking and teach- 
 ing of rhetor and sophist, led to the weight 
 of different judgments neutralizing con- 
 tagion. To this emotional mind of the crowd 
 the Hellenes were exceedingly susceptible. 
 So also are Americans. 
 
 There is no alchemy by which we can trans- 
 mute the rich and vivid life of that elder peo- 
 ple to our view. And we can not objectively 
 see ourselves. It is only when we and our 
 social accomplishments for human life have 
 at last receded into past history that we can 
 be viewed in large perspective, without any 
 megalomaniac estimate of our own, or any 
 micrifying judgment of others setting us 
 where they declare we belong. The im- 
 agination, the imaginative warmth and en- 
 ergy that plays so lively and so profound a 
 part in the spiritual life of the Germanic 
 races when compared with other peoples, is 
 in Hellene and American alike, and a basis 
 of their likeness. 
 
 The Greeks had the inestimable gift of a 
 noble curiosity, which drives human beings to 
 look further, and still further, and question 
 
CERTAIN LIKENESSES 327 
 
 if there is not more beyond. They brought 
 a clear, fearless intellect to every question, 
 a daring through which they irresistibly rose. 
 They had, that is, a mind that molded its 
 thought to action and, accepting no attitude 
 as permanent and final consciously avoided 
 a fixed mode, rigidity, crystallization. They 
 yearned for and placed themselves in the 
 flux of things. They loved the struggle of 
 opposing forces, the combat of contraries — 
 even to putting antithesis in their philosophy, 
 their drama, and into the form of the sen- 
 tence in which they expressed their thought. 
 Their civihzation was essentially modern. 
 They exampled the dynamic theory of life — 
 constant moving. They were dynamic, not 
 static. This makes their qualities, their 
 spirit, so difficult of molding to formal defini- 
 tion. Life to them was desire for freedom, 
 for expression. They fulfilled the law that 
 so long as a race is plastic and capable of 
 change it is vigorous, and that when that race 
 takes on fixity, persistence in form, it is ef- 
 fete and prepared for extinction. Their 
 passage through their centuries exemplified 
 the definition of life by Herbert Spencer, 
 "the continuous adjustment of internal rela- 
 
328 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 tions to external relations," and their death 
 came in "the non-correspondence of the or- 
 ganism with its environment. ' ' 
 
 THE COSMIC VISION THE GREEKS WORKED OUT 
 
 The Hellenes are thousands of years in the 
 silent land. Disintegrators of theirs and 
 opponents, someone has suggested, live 
 mainly in the penumbra of their cutting-off. 
 They left a splendid legacy and spoke in 
 a voice of surpassing wisdom and beauty to 
 all races succeeding them. Always young, 
 never gray with time, their life-products eter- 
 nize the greatness of ideas and fore© man- 
 kind to acknowledge their priceless value. 
 Ideas were to them immortal. The signifi- 
 cance of life to their view lay in the idea it 
 embodied. In their fortunate days prosper- 
 ity was their means to the idea, at no time the 
 end. The old Christian simile that poets and 
 preachers are but flutes through which the 
 Breath of God flows in divine music, is most 
 applicable to this people and their demiur- 
 gic accomplishment. 
 
 Hellas spiritualized the world, we have 
 said. That was the gift of her peoples' 
 
THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 329 
 
 single-hearted desire to know, of their severe 
 and disciplined earnestness, genuineness, 
 thoroughness. Hellenism, says an eminent 
 critic, is ' ' the habit of fixing our minds upon 
 the intelligible law of things," "the letting 
 of our consciousness play freely and simply 
 upon the facts before us." The Hellenes' 
 singleness of spirit, says another, is shown 
 in the crystalline lucidity of their speech — 
 their directness of phrase (that would be 
 called baldness even in the terseness of our 
 English) indicating directness of thought, 
 freshness of conception. A simplicity, prim- 
 itive, going straight to the definite, concrete 
 thing, gave them this directness in their en- 
 deavor to realize the world. 
 
 The primary conception their vision of life, 
 their incisive critical faculty, their unsearch- 
 able imagination evolved — that the world is 
 a general order — ^marches persistently. It 
 was the basis of their progress. It has been 
 the basis of others' Drang nach Wahrheit. 
 
 Order their susceptible, reasoning spirit 
 learned from generations about them, from 
 the springing and seeding of things, from 
 their azure heavens and the stately progress 
 of its stars, from their sea and its many- 
 
330 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 lisping tides, from the motion of the earth 
 of which they sometimes retold the legend 
 that they were the children. Infinitude they 
 felt in the all-natnre life of which their sanity 
 declared themselves a part. Eternity, also, 
 the elements taught them. Their minds 
 were fixed on, and their reason endeavoring 
 to picture the real world of which they felt 
 the physical to be a shadow. Energy, in ac- 
 cord with their struggling endeavor, was 
 divine, and in their conception of their per- 
 manence in it, they made an unconscious 
 statement of the principle of its conservation. 
 In nature's unconquerable processes they 
 saw life, a self-conscious reason acting 
 through laws and manifesting itself in the 
 natural world. Eeason, said Anaxagoras, 
 arranges and is the cause of all things. The 
 cosmos a universal and eternal whole, obe- 
 dient to law, at one with it, so to their con- 
 structive imagination — always, in modern 
 phrase, in touch with "the fire that bums at 
 the heart of things" — "an ever-hving fire," 
 old Heraclitus said, "lighted according to 
 measure and quenched according to meas- 
 ure" — the cosmos must imply a vitalizing 
 life, a divine intelligence, an eternal, per- 
 
THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 331 
 
 fecting mind manifesting itself. Thus they 
 proceeded to work out their conception of 
 divine dominion, to trace the action and 
 method of divine government. They gave 
 reasons for the God the Hebrews were de- 
 claring. This was the inevitable end of the 
 awe of personified nature, seeing God in 
 every living bush, which especially bore upon 
 and made their epic age beautiful. Es- 
 sentially the Hellenes ' religion was reverence 
 for powers of the universe, physical as well 
 as spiritual. 
 
 But why should not the everlasting reason 
 that manifests itself in the order of the world 
 of nature make evident its intention in the 
 world of active spirit? As they conceived 
 the material universe a mysterious whole, 
 under the reign of law, never losing its 
 majesty and might, so the thought and action 
 of man, intelligence and morals, they deter- 
 mined, with "that afflatus of religious feeling 
 with which the world of Hellenic existence is 
 saturated," could not be in league with or the 
 creatures of chance. The soul of man must 
 rest upon eternal laws. "All is divine and 
 all is human." Reason, self -active, whose 
 masterpiece is law, organized men's lives. 
 
332 THE GREEK SPIRIT 
 
 Human society is itself neither anarchy nor 
 chaos, but subject to law. Within that law 
 is evolution of spirit. Men must unite in an 
 ordered society. This to the Hellenes meant 
 their city-state and the unfolding of human 
 life within it. To "live according to na- 
 ture," one of their favorite maxims, meant to 
 the Greeks to live _according to order, away 
 from excess,*to live"^ccording to laws of self- 
 command and self-denial. 
 
 Hellas followed the fate of the incompa- 
 rable and precious as of the most worthless 
 civilizations. But the passion of her people 
 for the True, Beautiful, Just, and their 
 eternal meaning, still burns in broken marbles 
 and in scattered fragments of her poets and 
 other workers for her advance. Their re- 
 mains are to-day the chiefest witness of the 
 power of thought that our race-life has thus 
 far known. For those searching for light 
 they are an illumination, and to those seek- 
 ing the heroic and beautiful and rational, a 
 possession for all time.