CORNELL UNIVETISITY LIBRARY UNDERGRAJbUATE LIBRARY jm-^^rrr MitiiLMLm 9^ PniNTKBlNU.S.A. Cornell Univemity Ubrary DF 229.T53C81 190fB 3 1924 014 694 065 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014694065 i THUCYDIDES MYTHISTORICUS Francis MacDonald -Cornford UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS, INC. i4 Subsidiary of Xerox Corporation Ann Arbor ^ m m ^-g^^^^^g^g IxE^^ ^?5?I?^?5?5?JKi^ DATE DUE iy&&" iWffT! «». IVIHI" NOV 3 1966 GAYLORD PRINTED IN U.S.A. This "0-P Book" Is an Authorized Reprint of the Original Edition, Produced by Microfilm-Xerography by University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1965 THUCYDIDES MYTHISTOBICUS It I t LicXxi 3^V THFOTDIDES TTHISTOEICUS BY FRANCIS MACDONALD CORNFORD FELLOW AND LECTURER OF TRIXTTY COLLEGE, CAJIBRIDGE lavctTai. LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W. 1907 (All rights reserved) "0 > 9 TO JANE ELLEN HARRISON Si/ap ivr ov'tipdruc iroXXSc T£ Kai KaXSi' PKEFACE The title of this book needs a word of explanation, if not of apology ; for to any one wlio is accustomed to think of Thucydides as typically prosaic, and nothing if not purely historical, the epithet Mythistoricus may seem to carry a note of challenge, or even of paradox. But the sense in which the expression has here been used is quite consistent with the historian's much-taiked-of 'trustworthiness', and, indeed, with the literal truth of every statement of fact in the whole of his work. It is possible, however, even for a writer of history, to be something much better than trustworthy. Xenophon, T suppose, is honest; but his honesty makes it none the easier to read him. To read Thucydides is, although certainly not easy, at any rate pleasant, because — trustworthiness and all — he is a great artist. It is the ■ object of this essay to bring out an essentially artistic aspect of his work, which has escaped notice, partly because the history is so long that it is hdrd to take it in as a whole, and partly because tho execution of the effect is imperfect, having been hindered by the good intentions with which • Thucydides set out. The history, as it stands, is the product of two hardly compatible designs. It was originally planned as a textbook of strategy and politics in the form of a journal; and it is commonly taken to be actually nothing more. But the work, in the course of its progress, began to grow, as it were of itself, out of this pedestrian plan into a shape with another contour, which, however, is broken by the rigid lines of the old plan, and discontinuous; much as .a set of, volcanic islands might heave themselves out of the sea, at such angles and distances that only to the eye of a bii'd, and not to the sailor ci'uising among them, would they appear as the summits viil PKEFAGE of one and the same submerged mountain-p-hain. The present essay is mainly an .attempt to chart 'these ■ islands, leaving .nncoloured blank's where the sea lies fiat between them, and infringing, none - of the fishing-rights of the . professed historian. It is the intrusion of ,this artistic tendency-^for a thing 'so unpremeditated can hardly.be.caJledadesign— that justifies the' epithet Mytiiistoricus. By ' Mythistpria I mean history cast in a mould of 'Conception, whether artistic or philosophic, Trhich, long before the work was. even contemplated, was already inwrought into' the very structure of the- author's mind. In. every ago the common interpretation of this world of things is controlled. by some. scheme of unchallenged and unsuspected presupposition ; and the mind of any individual, however . little he may think himself to be in sympathy with his "contemporaries, is not an insulated compartment, but more like a pool in one' continuous medium. — the cir- cumambient atmosphere of his .place. and time. This element of thought is always, of course,-E80st difficult to detect and analyse, just because it is a constant factor which underlies rJ.1 the difierential characters of many minds! It was im- pcssibie for Dante to know. that his scheme of redemption yroulcl appear -improbable w;hon astronomy should cease to be geocentric. It is impossible for tis to tell how pervasively our ovni view of the world is coloured by Darwinian biologj' and by the categories of mechanical and physical science. And so it was with Thucydides. Ho chose a task which promised to lie wholly within the . sphere of positively aacertiinable fact; and, to make assurance double sure, he. set himself limits which further restricted this sphere, till it seemed that no bias, no preconception, no art except the art of methodical inquiry, could possibly intrude. But he had not reckoned with the truth that you cannot collect ficts, Like so many pebbles, without your own personality and iibe common mind of your age and country having something to say to the choice and arrangement of the collection. He had forgotten that he was an Athenian, born before Aeschylus was dead; and it did not occur to him PFvEFACE IX that he' must have a standpoint and outlook from Tvliich the wprld,- having a long way to travel in a thousand or two thousand years, would drift far indeed. Thus it came about that even his vigilant precaution albwed a' certain traditional mode of thought, characteristic of 'the Athenian mind, .to shape the mass of facts which was to have been shapeless, so chat the work of science came- to be a work of art. And, sinoQ^this mode of thought, had, as ^ye shall- see, grown "without a break out of a mythological conception of the world of human acts and pp^ssions, which is the world of history, I have given him the epithet Jlythistoricus. This essay, although. its argument (of which a summary will he found in the Table of Contents) 'is continuous, has been divided into two parts which in a way reflect the twofold design, of Thucyd ides' history. Having occasion to look into the question;, how the Peioponnesian War aros.e, I felt, vaguely but strongly, that Thucydides' account of its . origin is remarkably inadequate ; and I came to form a very different theory of the. real causes of "the. war. This theory I have stated in the first four chapters, because, although the subject seems to me to be of no great importance in itself, it. led me to inquire further, why Thucydides has told us about this matter — and told us at considerable length — so exceedingly little that appears to us relevant. The rest of the book is an answer to this question. I found that the reason lay, not in the author's famous reticence — he thought he had recorded all we should want to know — but in the fact that he did not, as is commonly asserted, take a scientific view of human history. Rather he took the view of one who, having an admirably scientific temper, lacked the indispensable aid of accumulated and systematic knowledge, and of the apparatus of scientific conceptions, which the labour of subsequent centuries has refined, elaborated, and distinguished. Instead of this furniture of thought, to the inheritance of which every modern student is born, Thucydides possessed, in common with his contemporaries at Athens, the cast of mind induced by an early edjucation consisting almost X PREFACE exclusively in the study of the poets. No amount of hard, rational thinking — an exorcise which Thucydides never iuter- mitted — could suffice to break up this mould, in an age when science had as yet provided no alternative system of conception. The bent of his poetical e,nd artistic nurture comes out in the mythistorical portions of the work, which in the later chapters I have singled out and put together. The principle which informs and connects them is the tragic theory of human nature — a traditional psychology which Thucydides seems to me to have learnt from Aeschylus. I have tried to show at some length how the form of t^ie Aeschylean drama is built Upon this psychology ; and, finally, I have traced the theory of the tragic passions back into that dim past of mythological belief out of which it came into the hands of the Athenian dramatists. So my original question finds its answer. Thucydides never understood the origin of the war, because hia mind was filled with preconceptions which shaped the events he witnessed into a certain form ; and this foiTQ chanctd to be such that it snapped the causal links between incidents, in the connexion of which the secret lies. The Greek historians can be intei-preted only by reference to the poets; and to understand the poets, we must kn'bw something of the mythological stage of thought, the fund of glowing chaos out of which every part of that beautiful, articulate world was slowly fashioned by the Hellenic intellect. There is, on the literary side, no branch of classical study which is not still sufl'ering from the neglect of mythology. The poets are still treated as if, like an eighteenth-century essLjist, they had a tiresome trick of making 'allusions' which have to be looked up in a dictionary. The history of philosophy is wi'itten as if Thales had suddenly dropped from the ehy, and, as he bumped the earth, ejaculated, 'Everything must be made of water I' The historians are examined on the point of 'trustworthiness' — a question which it is the ir^veterate tendency of Englishmen to treat as a moral question ; and, the certificate of honesty once awarded, their evidence is accepted aa if they had written yesterday. The PREFACE XI fallacy whiclr I have designated 'The Modernist Fallacy' was never, perhaps, so rife as it is now; and, but that I have no wish to be contentious, this essay might be taken as a polemic against it, in so far as I have argued that the thought of a most prosaic and rational writer of antiquity moved ^ in an- atmosphere which we should recognize' to be poetic and mythical. Since I make no claim to have added to the. stock of- detailed historical information, but only to have given a new. setting to established facts, I have not thought it necessary to acknowledge the source of every statement. The material of the first four chapters is taken largely from Dr. Busolt's monumental Gricchische GescMchte, or from well-known sources which Dr, Busolt's learning and industry have made easily accessible to any student. I have also found Beloch's work useful and suggestive. If I have, for the convenience of exposition, here and there expi-essed disagreement with a phrase from Professor Bury's History of Greece, I would not be thought insensible of the services rendered to scholar- ship by a student whose vast erudition has not blui^ted the delicate feeling for poetry revealed in his editions of Pindai. My thanks are due to the Publishers for their unvarying courtesy and consideration. My friend, Mr. A. E. Bernays, of Trinity College, has kindly read the proofs and suggested corrections. I should like also to recognize with gratitude the wonderful promptitude and efficiency of the readers and staff of the Clarendon Press. There remain two other debts of a more personal kind. One, v;hich I am glad to acknowledge in this place, is somewhat indefinite, but still profound. It is to Dr. Verrall, who, at a time when classical poetry in this country either served as an engine of moral discipline in the teaching of grammar or added an elegance of profane scholarship to the cultured leisure of a deanery, was among the first to show that a modem intellect could achieve a real and burning XU PKEFACE contact with the living minds of Greece. From his books and lectures many of my generation first learnt that the Greeks were not blind children, with a singular turn for the common- place, crying for the light of Christian revelation ; and I am conscious, moreover, that in this present attempt to under- stand, not the syntax, but the mind, of Thuoydides, I am following, for part of the way, a path which first opened before me when, in the breathless silence of his lecture-room, I began to understand how literary art could be the passion of a life. The other obliga,tion is to Miss Jane Harrison, to whom this book is dedicated in token that, but for the sympathy and encouragement she has given at every stage of its gi'owth, this dream would have followed others up the chimney with the smoke. Any element of value there may bo in the mythological chapters is due, directly or indii'ectly, to her ; and, grateful as I am for the learning which she has put unreservedly at my disposal, I am much more grateful for the sv.'ift and faultless insight which, again and again, has taken me straight to a point which my slower apprehension had fumbled for in vain. F. M. C. TkIKITT CoLtEOE, Janiuinj, 1907. CONTENTS PART I. THUCYDIDES HISTORICUS I. THE CAUSES OF THE WAR PAOES Thucydidcs' first Bock does not provide either Athens or Sparta -with B sulHoient motive for fighting. The current views that the war was (1) promoted hy Pericles from personal motives ; (2) racial ; (3) political, are inadequate. Thucydides' own view that the Spartans wme forced into war is true. Their reluctance explained. But Pericles also had no reason to desiro war. Thucydides states only official policies ; perhaps this policy was unofBcial. . . 1-li II. ATHENIAN PARTIES BEFORE THE WAR What party at Athens mado the war ? The country population was a negligible factor in politics before the war. The large and growing commercial population in the Piraeus, who regarded the naval supremacy of Athens as a means of controlling trade, furnished the bulk of Pericles' majority in his last years, and bocamo strong enough to dictate his policy 15-24 III. THE MEGAI'.IAN DECREES All non-Thucydidoan accounts of tbd outbreak of war make the negotiations turn solely on the Mogarian decrees. Thucydides records none of those three decrees and keeps Mogarian affairs in the background, suppressing Pericles' connexion with them. The coercion of Megara was the first stop in the unofBcial policy forced on Peiieles by his commercial supporters ; tlio" object being to establi.-ih a trade-route from the Piraeus to the West across tho Mogarid from Nisaea to Pegao, and so to cut out Corinth. The earlier Peloponnesian War offers a parallel : tho Egyptian Expedi- tion analogous to the Sicilian, which was from the first part of the commercial party's plan. 25-3S IV. THE WESTERN POLICY Thucydides says nothing of earlier Athenian reJ'tions with the West, or of the part taken by Pericles in the alliance with Corcyra ; though ho gives one or two indications that this alliance was a stop towards conauost of tho West. Similarly, designs on Cartliagp __ . _ date from nine years earlier than ThucydidcsMirst m^ition. The Western policy was hindered by Pericles, who always dis- approved of it; but it explains tho fresh course taken by tho war after his death. Thucydides always regarded the Sicilian Expedition as an irrelevant diversion, because ho novcr saw its connexion ivith tho Mogarian docroos, and could not know that Pericles adopted the anti-Megarian policy only because it was forced upon him. 39-51 3dv CONTENTS V. THUCTDIDES' CONCEPTION OF HISJTOEY PAQES How could Thucydides regard his account of the origin of the war as complete and final ? The contrast between it and our own hypo- thesis points to his conception of history being different from the modern. He undertakes to record only what was actually done in the war (Jpya) and the 'accounts' {\6yoi') given by the agents. (This method was partly imposed by circumstances. His original plan of the work.) He says nothing about causes ; and draws no distinction Xietwosa ahiai and npo(pi ii. 65. The Sicilian disaster and the fall of Athens are mentioned in S12. 48 THtJCYDIDES HISTOEICUS 'So long as Pericles ruled Athens in the times of peace, he led her -wisely and brought her safely through, and in his days she reached the height of her greatness. "When the T,-ar broke out, it is clear that, here again, he was right in his estimate of her power. He survived the declaration of war two years and sis months; and after his death his foresight with respect to the war was still more clearly apparent. He had told the Athenians that all would bo well if they would be quiet, keep up their navy, and not try to add to their evipire during the war or run their city into danger. But the Athenians did everything he told them not to do : they engaged in a policy which seemed to have nothing to do at-ith the vjar from motives of private ambition or private gain,^ with disastrous consequences to themselves and their allies. Success would only have meant glory or profit to individuals ; failure meant ruin to Athens. The reason was that Pericles, since his position was assured by his acknowledged worth and wisdom, and he was proved trans- parently clear of coiruption, controlled the multitude in a free spirit. Instead of being led by them, he led them ; he was no'j seeking to acquire power by ignoble arts, for, on the strength of his known high character, he already possessed it ; consequently, he did not . speak to please the multitude, but was able to oppose and even to anger them. Accordingly, whenever he saw that they were elated with iznmcasured arrogance,^ he spoke and cast them down into fear; and again, when they were unreasonably afraid, he tried to restore their confidence.- So came about what was nominally a de- mocracy, but really a reign of the first citizen. ' His successors, however, were more on an equality with one another, each struggling to be first ; and they wore in- clined to flatter the people and to sacrifice the public interests. Hence came many errors — errors for a great city with an empire; above all, the Sicilian expedition, though in this ^ a\Aa ?fa) ToC troXiiiov SoKoviTa flvat . . . InoKirtvaav, — the Sicilian expedi- tion. 'Private ambition' -wiis Alcibiados' motive; 'private gain' that of tlie commercial party. ' TrapA Kaipiv vPpu eapaowras. THE WESTERN POLICY 49 instance it was not so much that they made a mistake of judgement in estimating the strength of those whom they assailed,' as that the men who sent out the expedition, instead of taking thought for the needs of a distant army, were engaged in private quan-els for the leadership of the people. So they kept no vigilant eye on the fortunes of the fleet, and at home for the fii-st time introduced civil commotion.' We do not wish to minimize or brush away the words: ' instead of being led by them, he led them '—words which seem to contradict the hypothesis we have put forward. But it is fair to point out that Thucydides is reviewing the whole of Pericles' career, not speaking only of the last five years of it. He ends with the words, 'So came about what was nominally a democracy, but really a reign of the first citizen.' The reign of Pericles was established ten years before the war, when his last opponent, Thucydides, son of Melesias, was ostracized. The historian is contrasting the career as a whole with the thirty years that followed. It is fair also to remark that a statesman who is described as ' not saying pleasant things', 'opposing the people even to angering them,' 'casting them down when they were elated by un- measured arrogance,' was certainly one whose aims and policy were likely to differ from those of his supporters. The hypothesis which we have put forward merely involves that, although all that Thucydides says is true of Pericles while his position was undisputed, in the last few years of his life ho chose to lead the people ruther than be led hy them. The main point of the contrast, what seemed to Thucydides the great diflerence between Pericles and his successors, is that Pericles had no private ends to serve. His position was assured; he was indiScrent to money. The later leaders — especially Alcibiades — had to win a position; they sought ' This remarkable sontenco has the air of a cool revision of the judgement expressed in vi. 1 : ' Most of the Athenians had no idea of the size of Sicily and the numbers of its inhabitants, nnd did not know they were undertaking a war not much loss serious than the Peloponncsian war.' That was written when Thucydides' mind was full of conceptions hereafter to bo analysed. E 50 THUCYDIDES HISTOEICUS glory and power. Others — especially the dynasty of tradesmen — sought profit. Hence, where they flattered, Pericles ruled ; while they were ambitious or sordid, he was 'free' (iXevOfpos), above ambition and above gain. That, this is a true picture there is no reason to doubt ; ' we only question whether it is quite, complete. Thucydides, contrary to his custom, anticipates the death of Pericles in his naiTative by more than a yeai-.^ He has just before given us a glimpse of his behaviour when the tide of popular indignation had risen against ■ him, and in the last speech he shows us the stately figure erect and calm above the storm. Then, as if he could not bear to let any later troubles or even death itself come between us and this impression, -he drops the curtain on the close of Pericles' life. Whatever. stood here in his original draft, he has sub-, stituted for it the sober and final tribute of a reverent admiration. The historian, when he watched the' opening events of the war and set about his task, could not foresee the Sicilian expedition. He was. not in the confidence either of Pericles or of Cleon and . the ether, more obscui'e, captains of ■ the commercial party, who forinulated, in their secret conclaves, ■ the policy of the Piraeus... They, were clever enough not to show their, full hand lo any outside, observer. The first move in the game was the . decree against Megara, the significance of which was seen by Peiicles but hy no one else. What made ' it finally impossible, for any one else to see it^ Was Pericles' axjtion in . taking the anti-Megarian policy out of the hands of its originators, and adopting it as his own. Thucydides knew that he could not be acting from personal spite ; but the decrees and the sustained attacks by which year by. year they were foUo.wed up could only be interpreted by one who- took them. in connexion with the whole series of,, operations along the- route to the West. At the outset, ' ii. 65. The death of.Pericles occurred in September .429, and its proper place in chronological order -roould be at il. 95. THE WESTERN tOLICY 51 the only people who had an inkling of the larger scheme •were : the leaders of the commercial, party, who originated it; Pericles, who adopted the first manoeuvre in order to thwart, if possible, the rest of the plan ; and (probably) the democratic leaders at Corcyra, the men whose arguments and pretexts will be found in the Corcyrean envoys' speech.^ These envoys, not realizing, perhaps, how delicate- the. situa- tion was at Athens, had tactlessly dropped a phrase which stuck in Thujydides' head because it puzzled him. They • had said something about Corcyra being a convenient station on the voyage to Sicily and Italy. What could this have to . do with a war between Athens and Sparta ? Yet Thucydides vaguely felt that this consideration weighed with the majority who voted for alliance with Corcyra ; and so with his punc- tilious fidelity he puts down exactly what he knew: 'And further it seemed to them that the island was conveniently situated on the coasting-route to Italy and Sicily.' The policy of the Piraeus came to the surface only after Pericles' death ; it did not finally and fully emerge dll the great expedition of 415, and by that-time Thucydides' opinion about the origin of the war was already formed, and much of his First Part was written.' In the lapse of eighteen years the memory of the outbreak had faded. Looking back, ho sees the. figure of Pericles, exalted by distance .and consecrated by time. How 'great was that free and gene- . rous spirit, in contrast with the . selfish ambition or low- covetousness of the men who had taken.' his place! The Sicilian expedition was theii- .work ; seeking glory or private gain, they involved Athens in ' a policy which seeined. to have nothing to do with the war'. -To Thucydides, from first' to last, the Sicilian enterprise was an irrelevant diver- sion-imported into the. war between Athens and Sparta— the war as designed by Pericles ; and he attributed it to motives . which, as he rightly insists, Pericles could not have enter- tained. Hence he never saw its connexion with the Mefrai-ian . decrees— a link without which the origin of the Pelopon- ncsian 'War was an insoluble enigma. 1 i. 82^6. E 3 CHAPTER V THTTCTDIDES' CONCEPTION OF BttSTORY Ik the foregoing chapters we have put forward a theory of the causes of the Peloponnesian War. If that theory is well founded, the causes were such as Thucydides could not have known. This is certainly a sufficient reason for his not having told us what they were ; but it does not explain why he did not look for the origin of the war in the quarters where we have looked for it, or how he came to regard his account as complete and satisfactory. He says that his description of what immediately preceded the outbreak is written in order that no one may ever have to ask ' out of what so great a war arose ' — the very question, it might seem, which we have spent four chapters in trying to answer. Whether the answer we found is the right one or not, what is certain is that some answer is wanted. Our next ques- tion is : why was Thucydides content with his First Book, and -why ai-e we not content with it ? There are on the surface indications of a wide divergence between his conception of his task in wi'iting history and our conception of it, between what he offers and what we demand. Can wa trace this divergence down to its source ? Putting our own, very different, hypothesis along-side of Thucydides' introductory Book, and taking it (whether right or. wrong in points of detail) as at least the expression of a tj-pically modem view, can we explain the contrast between the two accounts? This is a wider and more interesting inquiry than the search for the origin of a particular war between two ancient cities ; it should take us to the centre of Thucydides' general view of history and of tho historian's a:.m and oiEce. THXJCYDIDES' CONCEPTION OF HISTOKY 53 What, precisely, does Thucydidcs undertake to tell us ? — that is the point fi'om which we must start. The answer lies in his own prefatory statement of his scope and method.^ In the- first place, he undertakes to state the plain trath about what happened.^ In the second place he divides his subject- matter — the truths he means to record — under two heads: speeches,(Xoyoi), and the events (^pya) of the war. The passage is so important for our purpose that we will give it in full : 'As to the accounts given of themselves by the several parties in speeches,'^ either on the eve of war or when they were already engaged, it would be hard to reproduce the exact language used, whether I heard it myself or it was reported to me by others. The speeches as they stand repre- sent what, in my opinion was most necessary to be said by the several speakers about the matter in question at the moment, and I have kept as closely as possible to the general sense of what was really said. Of the events-^vfha.t actually was done in the war,* I have thought fit not to write from ' any chance information, nor yet according to any notion of my own. but to record those at which I was present, or which I heard of from others, with the greatest possible accuracy of investigation. To discover these facts was labori- ous, because those who were present at the various events differed in their reports of the same occuiTences, according to the state of their memories or as they sympathized with one side or the other.' Observe that in this very careful account of what the history is to contain, there is not a word about causes. Each episode in the military, operations is to be described just as it hap- pened ; we shall bo told no more than an eyewitness might have seen on the spot. Besides this, we are to listen to the ' accounts ' given, the arguments used and pretexts alleged, by politicians and the representatives of states — no more than the audience at the assembly or at a, congress of alHes might actually have heard. The history as we have it does ' 1. 20-2. ' •ttiiv yivo/iivoiv r!) aatpis, i. 22. 4. ' i. 22 offo nlv \6yii> dwov exaoTOt. * rd 8' ipya tuiv vpa)(PivTa>y ly rf voXijiif, 54 THUCYDIDES HISTOEICUS consist, almost entirely, of these two elements. But why has Thucydides deliberately adopted such an extraordinary method? Why, in pai'ticular, does he say nothing about causes, but put us off with the ex parte ' accounts ' of in- terested persons, as publicly and formally stated with a view to persuading other interested persons 1 Here on the threshold we Snd, between his notion of an historian's business and ours, as wide a gulf as can be conceived. How could he think that it was enough to tell us what ' the Corinthians ' or 'the Athenians' alleged, instead of what were the real, underlying causes of this war ? The method adopted by Thucydides was to a certain extent imposed upon him inevitably by the circumstances in which he wrote. A brief account of these will throw some light on the peculiarities of the work as we have it, and will help us to determine how far these peculiarities are shaped by external accident, and how far they result from the author's, conception of history. The work was intended to cover the whole twenty-seven years of the Peloponnesian War. The eight books we have- all that ever was written — actually cover twenty years. They are divided into two nearly equal parts, of which the second is unfinished.^ Part I contains the Ten Years' War. Part II begins with a fresh introduction in which the author for the first time remarks that the Ten Years' War turned out to be only the first episode in a struggle of which it was all along 5 prophesied that it should last thrice nine years — the only f one of the many oracles which was fulfilled. From this remark, occurring where it does, it is plain that Part I must have been far advanced before Thucydides knew how long the war was to continue. Careful search, moreover, has detected in it here and there several expressions which a thorough revision would have removed, and it may be con- cluded that, although considerable additions were made later, it was never rewritten as a whole. The second Part is ' Tlie division occurs at v. 20. The introduction to Part II begins at v, 26 ; chapters 21-5 forming a connecting link. THUCYDIDES' CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 55 incomplete ; Book VIII ends abruptly and is throughout in an unfinished condition. On the other hand, Books VI and VII (the Sicilian Expedition) "are perhaps the moat perfect part 01 the work. We may infer -with certainty that Thucydides having begun to write, as he says himself,^ so soon as the war broke out, worked at the history, as occasion offered, all through the twenty-seven years of war and after his. restoration fi"om exile at its close, until death ended his labours. About his manner of working there can be little doubt. He evidently kept a sort of diary, recording the bare events, with details of time and place, as he heard of them. The entries form an annalistic thread, ranning through the whole, on which the fuller narrative could be constructed. In some places they actually remain embedded in the expanded story, which in other instances has replaced them.^ With this chronological framework as a basis, he would write up the more elaborate descriptions whenever he met with an eye- witness who could supply the necessary details, and the account would, no doubt, be carefully revised, if fresh information came in later from another source. From the circumstance that the unfinished Book VIII contains only short notes of the contents of speeches, whereas the narrative is in parts fairly full, it is not rash to conclude that in many cases the finished speeches of the earlier books were the last additions to the narratives which they accompany. His choice of incidents for fuller treatment was, of course, in part dependent on the chance of his meeting with some one who possessed the ■ necessary information. Apart fi-om this, he appears to have selected typical episodes, such as the siege of Plataea, the victory of Phormio, Demosthenes' campaign in Aetolia, the capture of Sphactcria, Brasidas' great march to the North, the siege of Syracuse. Each of these military " i. 1. 1. ' Soo, for oxnmple, ii. 19. 1, where Hie formnl record of the inv.asion is left in the middle of the detailed description of it. On a close scrutiny it will bo seen that chapters 18 and 19, which precede and follow it, arc slightly inconsistent, and must have been written at difforont times. 56 THUCYDIDES HISTOEICUS achieTements bad some peculiar cii-cumstances which made the operations interesting to contemporaries — though not al-n-ays in the same degree to us — from the point of view of strategy and tactics. A few episodes, of which the most remarkable is the Corcyrean sedition, are treated in the same way on account of their political significance. The description of the plague at Athens is for the instruction of physicians. In all these cases, which together make up the greater part of the work, the intention is that which is staied in the introduction. ' I shall be satisfied if the facts are pro- nounced to be useful by those who shall desire to know clearly what has happened in the past and the sort of things that are likely, so far as man can foresee, to happen again iq the future.' Such was the plan originally laid down for himself by Tiiucydides. He was not reviewing his whole period in focus and perspective after a sufficient interval of time, but he was obliged to compose at odd moments, determined by tiie accidents of opportunity and scattered over a period of thirty to thirty-fivo years. During all the first part of his labours he was writing concurrently with the events he recorded, often in the dark as to their relative importance, their bearing and connexions, and necessarily ignorant of theJ-T remoter consequences. All he could do at first was to keep his journal, and now and then to work up a detached episode. The result could not for a long time possess more unity than the collected volumes of a monthly review; no general tendency or trend of events could be discerned, no shadow cast before the unknown issue. But these considerations of outward circumstance, while they account for many of the features which make the work so unlike a, modem history, leave our present question untouched- However much he might be in the dark about the causes of the war when he began to write, however impossible it may have been for the darkness to be dispelled later, the strange thing is that he should have thought that he had dispelled it. It is stranger still that in describing the THUCYDIDES' CONCEPTION OF HISTORY 57 contents of his book he should have altogether omitted to mention causes, and laid down a plan of writing which, if adhered to,^would exclude any discussion of them. Another anclenthistorian, Polybius ^ has told us explicitly what class of things he considers are the ' causes ' of a war. In his supeiior and priggish way, he speaks with contempt of men who cannot distinguish the ' hegin7dng ' {apxn), ov fii-st overt act of hostilities, from the ' cause and pretext ' (atVt'as Kal irpo^acTws). ' I,' he says, ' shall regardthe firstjitemptt<^put in execution what had already been determined, as a " begin- ning"; hnt I shall mean by "causes" (ahias) those decisions and counsels which precede and lead to such attempts; I mean considerations and states of mind and calculations, and the things which hnng us to make a decision or form a purpose.' A pretext is an alleged ' cause '. Polybius illustrates his use of terms from the war of Antiochus, of which the ' cause ' {alria) was the anger of the Aetolians ; the pretext (-Kpoipacns} was the liberation of Greece; the beginning {apxv) was the descent of Antiochus upon Demetrias. The whole passage is in a didactic tone ; Polybius is evidently pleased with his powers of discrimination. With this in mind let us look at the passage ^, where Thucydides for a moment goes beyond his prescribed limits and expresses his own opinion about the ' cause ' of the Pelo- ponncsian War. We shall find all the three terms distinguished by Polybius. 'The Athenians and Peloponnesians began (I'lp^avro) by breaking the thirty years' truce which they had made after the capture of Euboea. Why they broke it — their grievances and differences (ras alrCas koL rdy biacpopis), I have first set forth, that no one may ever have to inquire from what origin (i$ oTov) so great a war arose among the Hellenes. The most genuine pretext, though it appeared least in what ivas said,^ I believe to have been the increasing power of Athens, and » iu. 6-7. » i. 23. i. Wo shall discuss later tho digression (i. 88-118) -where this statement is repoatod and the grounds of tho Spartans' fear are explained. ' Ti^i' liiV i^T/OfariTriv rp6ipafftv, u.ll a pretext. Jowett, in rendering this phrase, instinc- tively substitutes the modernism : ' the real, though unavowed, cause.' Hobbes is less modern and renders it faithfully : ' the tiTiest Quarrell, though least in speech.' ^ ^ at ^ es TO ) Si Ix^PV '5 Trpoo^fiXofjAvij h 'AOTjyaiovs: CK raiy AlyiyTjriajv tyii'tTo l^ IDES MYTHICtJS ■the liistory -wbuld be "rather unattractive*, what attraction •would it retain for us to-day ? Yet it does attract and move us strangely ; and this appeal is a thing to be reckoned with and explained. The results of our inquiry, if they are true, will be of some literary interest, and they also have a bearing on the moral character of Thucydides, The current interpretation of that part of the history which deals with Cleon leaves a dark cloud hanging over it's author, — a cloud which well-meaning defenders have, tried, but never quite successfully, to dispel. It cannot, we tliiuk, be. denied that Thucydides hated and despised Cleon, We have no.right to complain of that ; for one man tnay hate and despise another .with very good reason; and we need. not think much the worse of either. The moral question touches not the man, but the. historian. Has ho • misrepresented, the facts about Cleon because he had. a ' personal grudge ' against * an able, but coarse, noisy, ill-bred, audacious man1\^ If he has done- so, and for that motive, what, are we to say of an historian who .began his work with an austere profession of fidelity to truth, and then distorted his narrative, concealed facts, and insinuated detraction, with the' deliberate purpose o.f .disci-editing a politician who had been instrumentalincausing his own banishment?. Yet this is wha,t-is implied iu- the cuiTCnt hypothesis, that Thucydides was actuated' by a personal grudge. But why do we let him ofi" with this mild phrase, instead of branding "the man for. a hypocrite, to be ranked among the .lowest, as having sinned against, the- light? ' If we do let him off", it is because the history r.s a whole leaves an impression inconsistent with this account of the matter. It is not the -work of a man capable of consciously indulging the pettiness of personal spite, but of one who could teill the story .of his ow^^n military failure,. which cost him- twenty years of exile, without a syllable of extenuation. Throughout the book there is- a nobility of tone, a. kind of exalted aloofness, which makes some of his » .Bury, Eist.. qf ffreew (1900), p. 456. INTEODUCTOKY 81 grave iudgfments sound as if the voice of Histoiy herself had spoken, In the following pages we hope to show that Thucydides' incomplete presentation of fact in this part of the history is due, not to a personal motive, but to the influence of a principle of design which was never formulated, because he certainly did not" contemplate it in prospect when he began his work, and probably to the last never found out how pervasive and profound had been its operation. Wo believe, moreover, it is possible to lay our finger on the place where this now principle first definitely modifies the nar- rative. " It is at the beginning of Book IV, in the story of the occupation of Pylos. In the next chapter we shall proceed at once to this episode, and try to bring to the surface this :undorlying principle which in later chapters will be fm-ther illustrated and explained* ■There is always something ungracious, something, almost, of impiety, in the ofiice of criticism. A work of aft is not meant to be. taken to pieces; analysis is like a mischievous child dismounting a delicate machine. When it conies to poetry, our instinct revolts and cries out to us, for the sake of all that is beautiful, to leave it alone. But in the interpretation of an age far removed from ours, with a cast of thought, and a tradition, of artistic workmanship long fallen into disuse, we are faced with a ci"J.el dilemma. If wo analyse, some volatile and evanescent spirit is. released and is not to be recaptured; if wo refrain, v/e may miss the very qualities which the artist himself valued most highly. The generation is gone, which was bred to the same intellectual heritage and met the lightest hint with native comprehension. For us only the strono- effort of imaginative sympathy can reconquer the lost ground. CHAPTER VI THE LUCK OF PYLOS The first episode in the History which presents features apparently inexplicable on the supposition that Thucydides is •working on his avowed plan, and certainly not fully explained by any hypothesis yet advanced by modern criticism, is the story of the occupation of Pylos. We shall first give an outline of the narrative, in which we shall merely summarize or abbreviate, refraining, with all the Thucydidcan caution we can muster, from throwing any colour over it. We shall include those parts of the story in which the unexplained factor is evidently at work, excluding details which present no difiiculty. A few introductory words are necessary to describe the situation which immediately precedes our episode. The History has reached the opening of the seventh year of war (B.C. 425). In consequence of the check which the Pelononnesian arms had suSered in Acamania, following upon the failure of Demosthenes' daring plan of campaign in the same region, a lull had fallen. The first heat of conflict was over ; at Athens, as at Sparta, discouragement had strengthened the party of peace. Year by year the suffering peasants must crowd into the plague-stricken city, when word came that the irresistible army of invasion was mustering fit the Isthmus ; and year by year trudge sadly back to find the seared vestiges of ruin in trampled cornfield, in uptom vine and olive, and blackened homestead. In the early summer evenings, when the invader had crossed the pass above Acharnae, knots of ragged and dejected figures would gather on the noi-thward slopes of the Acropolis, and THE LUCK OF PYLOS 83 you might have heard husky voices debating whose farm ■was that, which was marked by the ugly red glow, yonder, on the foot-hills of Parncs. The Acharnians of Aristophanes was produced at the Lenacan Festival in February of (.his year. The poet's genial sense of the clean healthful ncss ami beauty of life on the country farms in happier do,ys had enforced the strong sanity of his appeal. He attempted to turn the current of blind exasperation against the invader into the channels that made for peace. It is no good, he told the poor fellows, to grind your teeth at the wicked Spartans ; the thing to do is to stop the war. Some of the real Acharnians must have been convinced ; for the good Nikias and his friends were returned in some force at the elections in April. True, the war-party had insisted that the operations in Sicily must be seen through, and forty ships were sent to relieve the small squadron already in the western seas. But Sicily was far away ; and it was understood that this expedition was to 'put an end to the war in that region', and to give the fleet the benefits of exercise.^ From this point wo will take up the text of the narrative and follow it closely with just th-e necessary abbreviation.* We shall draw attention in the notes to certain expressions which the reader is asked to bear in mind. The fleet sailed for Sicily under the command of Em-ymedon and Sophocles, with orders to put in by the way at Cofcyra, whore the democratic and philathenian party who held the capital were reduced nearly to starvation by the depredations of the exiles ensconced on Mount Istone. With the fleet went Demosthenes, who ' though since his retreat from Aearnania he held no official command,^ was at his own request, instructed to make use of the fleet, if he so wished, about the coasts of the Peloponnese ', As the squadron rounded the southern promontory of » iii. 115. i. ' iv, 2 £f. The passages within inrorted commas are translated, without abbreviation or addition. ' Ho was genor&i elect, but would not enter oh oiSce for some months. Q 3 84 THXJCYDrDES MYTHICUS ^lessenia, news came that a Peloponnesian fleet had stolen a march on them and was already at Corcyra. Eurymedon and Sophocles were anxious to push on. Demosthenes,' however, ' urged them to put in first at Pylos and do what was necessary before proceeding on their voyage. The - generals objected, but it so chanced that a storm came on which drove the fleet into Pylos.^ Demosthenes began at onco to urge that the position should be fortified ; this, he said, was the object he had had in view when he accompanied the fleet. He pointed out that there was great abundance of timber and stones, and that the position was naturally strong, while the country for a considerable distance round was, like the place itself, uninhabited. Pylos is about forty-six miles from Sparta, and lies in the land which was formerly Messcnia ; it is now called Koryphasium by the Lacedaemonians. The generals replied that there were plenty of desert promontories round the Peloponnese, which Demosthenes might occupy if he wanted the public money to be wasted. But Demosthenes thought that this particular spot had special advantages. There was a harbour at hand,^ and the Messoniaus, whoso ancient home this had been and who spoke the same dialect as the Lacedaemonians, could do them much harm from such a base ; and further they would be a trusty garrison. ' The generals would not listen to him ; no more would the soldiers, when he proceeded to impart his plan to the oflicers. Hence, the weather being unfit for sailing, he was compelled to remain idle ; until the soldiers themselves, having nothing to ^ iv, 3. 1 avTL\ey6vTwv 5J rcara tvx^,v X'^ifton' intycvvptevos Kar^i/fyKe ros vavs if rTjv UvXov. The large and deep bay of Navarino is partly closed by the narrow island of Sphacteria which lies, with a length of 2 J miles, along its mouth, leaving a narrow channel to the north, and a wider to the south. The north channel is dominated on its further side by the deserted peninsula of Pylos, the circumference of wliich is naturally defended by inaccessible cliiTs except for a small distance at the north end (whore a sandy isthmus joins it to the mainland), and for a somewhat longer extent on its south and south-west shores. ^ The anchorage was close to Pylos at the north-west corner of what is now the lagoon of Osmyn Aga. At this date the lagoon was navigable and formed an inner chamber north of Kavarino Bay, and partly cut off from it by a sand-spit. THE LUCK OF PYLOS 85 do, were seized with an impulse ^ to fortify the position. So they set about the work ; and, being unprovided with iron tools for stone-cutting, they brought rocks which they picked out and put together as they happened to. fit. Whore mortar was required, for want of buckets, they carried the mud on their backs, bending double to form a resting-place for it, and lodging their hands behind, to keep it from falling off. By every means in their power they hurried on, so as to complete the parts most open to attack, before the Lacedaemonians should ari-ive, the position being in most places so strong already that no wall was needed. The Lacedaemonians were just then celebrating a festival^; and, besides, when they . heard the news they made light of it, thinking that, when they did go out, they could easily take the place by assault, even supposing the Athenians would wait to meet them. They were also somewhat delayed by their army being still in Attica. In six days the Athenians finished the fortification on the land side and at other points -where it was most required. They then left Demosthenes with five ships to defend it, while the greater part of the fleet hastened on their voyage to Corcyra and Sicily.' ^ ' The Peloponnesian army in Attica, on hearing of the occupation of Pylos, retreated homewards in haste; for the Lacedaemonians, and especially King Agis, saw that this occupation touched them closely ; and further, the invasion having been made early, while the crops were still green, they wore running short of provisions for the soldiery, and bad weather had come on with a severity unusual at that ' season, and distressed the expedition. Thus many things coincided to hasten their retreat and to make this invasion very short. They had stayed in Attica only a fortni"ht.' "When the army reached home, the Spartiates raised the country-side and started to the rescue of Pylos. The rest of ' iv. 4. 1 ipftf) hlirfCTf irfpiaraaiv hcTefxlaat rh x<»P'OV. Wo omit ntptaTaaiy, the moaning of which is doubtful. ' iv. 5. 1 iopTr/v Tico tTvxov ayovTtt. 'Eruxof denotes the coincidence of two events with the implication that tho coincidence was unilosigned, or accidental. Often this implication is not felt at all. ' iv. 5. 2 Tars 5J v\(iom vaval ruy Is rijv Kipxvpav vKovv Kai Si/teXiav finflyovTo. 86 THtrCYDIDES MYTHICUS the LacedaemoBians "were slower to move, having but just returned from another expedition. They sent round a summons to their allies in all quarters, and recalled their fleet from Corcyra. It 'reached Pylos, unperceived by the Athenian fleet at Zakynthos'.^ On their approach Demosthenes sent two of his five ships to summon 'Eurymedon and the Athenians in the fleet at Zakynthos ' to come to him, as Pj'los -was in danger. They came in all haste. The Lacedae- monians vrere preparing for a combined attack by sea and land, ' expecting to capture -with ease such hastily constructed ■works, defended by so small a garrison.' They intended to block the fairway of the two entrances to the harbour with lines of ships, so as to exclude the Athenian flect,^ ' unless indeed they should have taken Pylos before' it arrived. ^ The fleet of Eurymedon, last mentioned as leaving Pylos for Corcyra and Sicily. Zakynthos is the firet port of call on the route northwards, about seventy miles from Pylos. - There has been much controversy on the question v^hieh wore the two channels to be blocked. My own opinion is (i) that in this part of the narrative ' the harbour ' means tho present lagoon of Osmyn Aga ; (a) that the sand-spit separating this lagoon from Navai-ino Bay reached nearly to Pylos, leaving only one narrow entrance just under Pylos; (3) that tho two channels to be blocked wore the two approaches to this entrance, viz. tho Sphagia channel, between tho north end of Sphactoria and the south shoro of Pylos, Rnd tho channel between the north-east corner of Sphacteria and tho end of the sand-spit. Tho object of blocking both these approaches, instead of the one entrance (between Pylos and the sand-spit), was obviously to keep open communications with the Spartans on tho island. If tho entrance only had been barred, tliey would have been isolated. I also believe that Thucydides' informant in the first narrative (tho siege of Pylos) was one of the defenders of Pylos, who would naturally moan by 'the harbour' the lagoon, just under Pylos, which was his centre of interest ; and that tho informant in the second narrative (tho capture of Sphacteria) was a different person, much better at describing localities, who had personally fought over the island on the day of its capture. His centre of interest was Sphacteria, and by 'tho harbour' he indisputably meant Kavarino Bay, where tho Athenian fleet then was. Thucydides never found. out that there were really two harbours, owing to the curious duplication of the sites : two harbours, each with two approaches, in the o:io case at the two ends, in tho other on the two sides of ono end, of tho same island. The only new point in this view is tho identification of tho nvo channels ; the rest is taken from the valuable papers of Mr, Grundy {J. H. S. svi) and Mr. Burrov/s (J. H. S. xviii). THE LUCK OF PYLOS 87 They landed a strong party on the island of Sphacteria, to prevent the enemy from occupying it. Pylos, which had no knding-plaee towards the open sea, would thus be completely isolated. They thought 'they would probably 'carry the position by siege, without a sea-fight or any danger, as it was unprovisioned and had been occupied with little prepara- tion '. Demosthenes drew up his three remaining ships under shelter of a stockade at the south-east comer of his defences. The sailors he armed as best he could, mostly with shields of wicker-work, ' For there was no means of providing heavy armour in an uninhabited spot; and even these arms they only obtained from a thirty-oared privateer and a light boat belonging to some Mossenians who just then arrived on the. scene.^ These Messenians proved to include about forty heavy-armed men, whom Demosthenes used with the rest.' Then follows a detailed account of Brasidas' unsuccessful attempt to force a landing on Pylos by running his ships ashore. The description concludes with the reflection : ' It was a singular turn of fortune ^ that Athenians should be on land, and that land Laconian, repelling an attack from the sea by Lacedaemonians ; while Lacedaemonians on ship-board wore trying to effect a landing on their own soil, now hostile to them, in the face of Athenians. For in those days it was the great glory of the Lacedaemonians to be an inland people superior to all in land fighting, and of the Athenians to be sailors and the first power by sea.' This observation is echoed again after the battle which followed between the two fleets in the harbour. The Peloponnesians had at the moment neglected the precaution of closing the entrances.' The Athenian fleet, reinforced by a few guard-ships from Nau- pactos and three Chians, sailed in and knocked them into bits, following up the pursuit to, the point of attempting to tow off from the shore some ships which had not been launched. ' iv. 9. 1 Vlfaarjvioiv . . . oJ irvxov irapayfyd/itvoi. iirXtrai tc twv JiUixtnjviuy TOUToiv u)s TtfftrapaicovTa (yivovTo. ' iv. 12. 8 Is TovTO vtpUan] ij rixv wore . , . ^ iv. 13. 4 oirt d Si(vori$rj<7av, ipip^ai Tout tarKovs, irvxov iroiijocu'Te?. 88 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS The Lacedaemonians ran down into the water to save them, and a fierce struggle ensued. Thus ' the usual methods of war- fare of the two combatants were interchanged. For in their excitement and dismay the Lacedaemonians were (one might almost say) fighting a sea-battle from land, while the Athenians as they were winning and were desirous to follow up their present good luck to the furthest point fought a land- battle from ships'.^ So ended the fii'st round of hostilities at Pylos. In shortening the above narrative we have intentionally brought into prominence a series of suggestions which are any- thing but conspicuous in the long story as it stands in the text, We have cut away the mass in which they are embedded and left them clumsily sticking out, so that no one can miss them. Probablj' thousands of readers have passed them without attention, and yet carried away just the impression which they ought to convey. That impression is that the occupation of Pylos^ — the fii'st step to the most decisive success achieved by Athens in this war — was the most casual thing in the VMVM. ' The fleet, bound as it was for Sicily, with instnictions to call on the way at Corcyra, where it was urgently needed, would never have put in at Pylos, if a storm had not ' hy chance ' ^ driven it to shelter. The generals in command could not imagine why the position should be occupied ; and when Demosthenes tried to convince the troops, he failed. It was owino- to the accidental continuance of bad weather that from sheer want of something to do 'an impulse seized' the soldiers to fortify the place. The undertaking was so un- e:v:pected that no tools had been provided; the walls were patched up somehow with rocks and mud. They had time to finish it because the Lacedaemonians at home were just then celebrating a festival. A singularly happy improvisation on ^ iv. 14. 8 0ov\6ncmi ry irapoiar) tvxji w5 i-rrl -nXfiarov iiTf((\6eTr. - Observe that the note of accident is clearly sounded at the outset in Kara ri^qv (not trvxf) and below in bpnij iyinfire. Later the fainter sug- gestion ofiiyxov suffices to sustain it. THE LUCK Oy PYLOS 89 the part of Fortune ; iDut there is more to come. Just •when reinforcements and a supply of arms are urgently needed by the extemporized garrison, a couple of piratical craft come bearing down the wind from the north. They turn out, oddly enough, to be Messenians with forty hoplites aboard and — how very fortunate ! — a supply of spare arms. When, finally, the Peloponnesians at the critical moment neglect a precaution vital to their plan, and leave the garrison of Sphacteria cut off on the island, we feel that Fortune has filled the cup of the Athenians almost overfull. To crown all, in her whimsical way, she reverses the rOlcs of the combatants, and sets the sailors fighting on land and the landsmen by water. ^ We observe, too, that if Fortune favoured the Athenians, they wore also helped by an extraordinary series of stupid mistakes on the Lacedaemonian side. When the news first reached Sparta, the Lacedaemonians at home could not see, what Agis saw clearly enough, that the capture of Pylos was a serious incident. They also thought they could easily capture the position; though they might have remembered that Sparta was notoriously incompetent in siege operations, and that the revolted helots, who were not backed by the first sea-power in the world, had, in a similar extemporized stronghold at Ithome, held them at defiance. When they saw the position, they were equally confident of taking it with ease. They expected to exclude the Athenian fleet by closing the entrances, and so to avoid a sea-battle altogether, llaey landed troops on the island, and then by neglecting to close the entrances left them cut ofi" — and this, though they knew the Athenian fleet was close at hand and were expecting its arrival. When it did arrive, their own fleet was not even clear of the beach and arrayed for battle. This series of blunders is hardly less remarkable than the series of accidents on the Athenian side. We may admit, however, that it is not incredible that Spartans should be exceedingly stupid. The difficulty arises over that pai't of the narrative which . is more- concerned with the Athenians. Can we accept this as a simple and natural 90 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS account of what really happened? The moment we turn back on it in a critical mood, we find that it is full of ohscurities, gaps, incoherencies, which cry out for explanation. ^\hen we laok stiU closer, wo remark two further points. One is that some of these obscurities can bo removed by carsful comparison of one part of the naiT.ative with another, so that we can piece together an hypothesis to fill the gaps, from . evidence supplied by Thucydides, but not used by him for this obvious purpose. The other is that we have not here, as at other . places in the Histoiy, a mere odd assortment of obscui-ities ; • but aU ■ the omissions- contribute ' to one effects What is left out is whatever would, explain the motives- and designs of the principal actors ; what is put in and emphasised is eveiy accident and every blunder, of the enemy, that favoured the occupation. There is hardly a sentence in. the whole story which is not so turned and so disposed as to make us feel that design.. countcd...£or. nothing and luck for- everything. Let us look at some of the questions which these omissions and incoherencies leave unanswered.. First, we may ask whether it is pi'edible that Demosthenes should not have explained sooner to Eurymcdon and Sophocles 'the object he had in view, when he accompanied the ileet'. The.' details, of- this plan are not disclosed till .the latest . possible moment in the nan-ative.' When he first asked the generals to put in' at Pylos, he is said to have requested them ' to - do what, was necessary before proceeding on their voyage'. They refused. Then followed the storm and drove them into Pylos. '.Not tiU this note of accident, has been sounded are we allowed to know - ' what was necessary '. Then, as if the .sight of Pylos for the first time suggested the planj Demosthenes points out .,the natural strength of the position. The general's, as if they had never had such a plan before them. Say that there are plenty of desert promontories, if Demosthenes wants to waste the public money on occupying them. Demosthenes urges that this one has special advantages, and produces his trump, card — the Messenians. In the next sentence we are told that he failed to convince, any one what- ever. By this arrangement of the story, Demosthenes' design THE LUCK OP PYLOS 91 is before our minds for the least possible time. It is not disclosed until in the first place it is firmly .fixed in our thoughts that the fleet is hastening to Corcyra, and in the second place Fortune has intervened decisively to hinder its iournoy ; and when it is disclosed, it is immediately (as it were) effaced again by the statement that the disclosure had no effect on any one. We are left with the impression that Demosthenes had not explained the whole thing to the gene- rals before tl-e storm occurred, and pressed on them all the advantages he mentions later. No wonder they objected to doing ' what was necessary \ In the second place, if the generals- were so blind to the possibilities of the place that they regarded the occupation as a waste of public money, we may naturally ask what occurred to make them change their minds and allow Demosthenes, after all, to remain ? A Poloponnesian fleet of sixty sail, as against their own forty, was already in their path. Why did they detach five ships and leave them with Demo- sthenes, while they ' hastened on their voyage to Corcyra and Sicily ' 1 Did Demosthenes appeal to the irregular commis- sion which licensed him to ' use the fleet, if he wished, about the coasts of the Peloponneso ' ? But, if he. did so, he was overmled; for we are definitely told that no one would listen to him. No ; the occupation of Pylos was • the purest of accidents. The building of the defences was a schoolboy frolic, begun (in schoolboy language) for a lark, to break the tedium of kicking heels and whistling for a wind. It kept them amused for six days, till the gale dropped. For all we are told, ■ besides this piece of mudlarki.ng, nothing whatever occurred" in the interval to change the opinion of the responsible officers. Yet, without a syllable- of explanation, we learn that they detached five ships — one-eighth of their strength— to garrison "the deserted promontory, and themselves 'hastened on their voyage to Corcyra and Sicily'. 'SDid they expect that Demo- sthenes with no provisions ^ and a sinallj insufliciently. armed force would hold Pylos till they came back, or did they mean to leave their fellow citizens, for whoso lives- they were ' iv. 8. 8 alrov re ov« ivuvroi. 92 THtJCYDIDES MYTHICUS responsible, to a certain fate 1 What -would they say to the Athenian people when they returned from Sicily ? When vre road on, however, we learn from a side-allusion to ' the Athenian fleet at Zakynthos ' that, so far from ' hasten- ing to Corcyi-a and Sicily ', they were, after at least ten days' or a fortnight's interval,^ still only seventy miles away, at the nearest port of call. This change of plan is not even directly recorded, much less explained. Yet it means that the generals pitched their sailing orders to the winds, loft Corcyra to the imminent peril of starvation or capture by as.iault, and en- dangered the advanced squadron in Sicilian waters which tliey were sent to reinforce. Examples were not wanting to warn them that in such circumstances, a failure or even a reverse, meant certain prosecution and death, if ever they set foot rgain in Athens. Yet they took the risk — all because of the mudlarks ! Om* purpose, however, is not to attack the veracity of Thucydides, but to understand his method. Without enlarging upon the obscurities of this episode, we have said enougli to prove that some explanation is needed. It is now clear that the story of Pylos, from first to last, is so treated as to convey the suggestion that it was all a stroke of lucJc. It is also clear that, unless Eurjrmedon and Sophocles were out of their minds, some elements in the situation of a less fortuitous nature have been omitted or left almost out of sight. Almost, but not entii-ely. The reader may have felt that, although the narrative indicates no connexion between the two references to the Messenians, some connexion there must have been. One of the exceptional advantages of Pylos to Demosthenes' mind was that it was the ancient home of the Messenians, whose knowledge of the local dialect would give them peculiar facilities for distressing the Spartans. The point is just mentioned and dropped. Six chapters later, a Messenian privateer with arms and reinforcements anives in the nick of ^ The time needed for news to reach Sparta and be forwarded to Agis in. Attica ; for the withdrawal of the army of invasion, and after thai, for word to be sent to the Peloponnesian fleet at Corcyra, and for these to come south. THE LUCK OP PYLOS 93 time. These Messenians were (though Thucydides does not mention it) the exiles -whom the Athenians had established at Naupactos, their naval base near the mouth of the Corinthian gulf. We remember now that in the previous year Demo- sthenes had been co-operating with these very Messenians in the Aotolian and Acam.anian campaigns. Moreover, in one of the battles he had employed them to play off a trick on his Doric antagonists.'^ The accent of his JTcsscnian friends wa.s now again to eoino In useful. And when the sentin.'l on PyloH reported that a couple of sail were standing in from the direction of Naupsictos, wo fancy Demosthenes was not surprised when they turned out to have forty hoplites aboard and a stock of spare shields in the casemates. Can we avoid the inference that the selection of Pylos was not so casual after all, that Demosthenes had learnt all about the possi- bilities of the position from his Messenian allies the year before ? Further, must we not conjecture that Eurymedon, not daring to leave more than iive ships behind, since the Peioponnesian fleet would almost certainly be recalled south and meet him, sent an urgent message to Naupactos, describing the position of Demosthenes and telling the Messenians to send a fast ship with such reinforcements and spare arms as they could produce without a moment's delay. The con- jecture is confirmed by the later statement ^ that some guard- ships from Naupactos joined the fleet while still at Zakynthos. Eurymedon may have meant to wait there within call till Demosthenes' force should have been replaced by a sufiicient garrison of Messenians, and then to reunite his fleet and pi'oceed to Corcyra and Sicily. But why arc we left to fill all these blanks by conjecture ? ' iii. 112 : 'At the iSrst dawn of day he fell on the Ambrakiots; who were still lying where tboy had slept, and who so far from knowing anything ot what had happened, thought his men were their own comrades. For Demosthenes had taken care to place the Messenians in tlie front rank and desired them to speak to the enemy in their oion Doric dialect, so putting' the out- posts off their guard, since it was still dark and their appearanee could not be distinguished.' This connexion has, of coiurse, been remarked by other writers. ' jv. 13. 1. 94 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS Moreover it is implied that Demosthenes knew that the Athenian fleet was still close at hand -when ho needed to be rescued; and this seems to prove that when Eurymedon ajid Sophocles left him, they arranged with him that they should stop at the nearest possible port. If that is so, to describe Eurymedon's fleet on leaving Pylos as 'hastening to Corcyra and Sicily' is, at least, misleading. But here, at any rate, there can be no intention to mislead, since the contradiction with what follows is patent. Wo can only conclude that Thucydides' mind is for some reason so bent on regarding the occupation of Pylos as a mere casual episode in a ' voyage to Corcyra and Sicily ', that this phrase slips out at a place where the context certainly contradicts it by implica.tion. Such a lapse, in so careful a writer, is by itself sufEcienl evidence of a preoccupied mind. TVe have here, in fine, a narrative which is unlike any earlier part of Thucydides' story. Hitherto he has told a plain tale, lucid, intelligible, natural. Now we find an episode in which facts of cardinal importance for the under- standing of the events are left unmcntioned, and indispensable links are wanting. If the missing facts and connexions were within the author's knowledge, why are they omitted? If they were not, we might at least expect that he would avow his ignorance and draw some attention to the blanks, instead of passing over them as if he were unconscious of their existence. The question then is this : Why has Thucydides represented the occupation of Pylos as the merest stroke of good luck, undertaken with the least possible amount of deliberate calculationj and furthered at every turn of events by some unforeseen accident 1 The simplest of all answers would be that as a matter of fact so it was. Accidents do happen ; and there certainly was a considerable element of luck. No one can foresee the occurrence of a storm. The festival at Sparta was a coinci- dence — though we note by the way that it was not a festival THE LUCK OF PYLOS 95 sufficiently important to prevent the army of invasion from being absent in Attica. The Messenian privateer might conceivably have come by accident — though the supply of sparo arms on so small a vessel is certainly odd. And so on. But all this does not explain the blanks and incohcren- cies we have noticed ; and it is fair to add that every additional accident increases the strain on our belief. As soon as -we reject this first answer, we have admitted that Thucydides — for whatever reason— is not telling the story just as it hap- pened and just as we should tell it. There is some unexplained factor at work, something of which we have not yet taken account. The solutions that have been .offered, when the problem before us has been faced at all, fall under two heads. We are told either that Thucydides is ' moralizing ' on the un- certainty of v/ar, or that he is actuated by some personal feeling of 'malignity' and indulging it in detraction. The first of these hypotheses is, in our opinion, a grave chai-ge against him as a man of sense ; the second is a still graver charge against his moral character. It is true that the uncertainty of war is one of the most frequent topics in the speeches ; and small wonder that it is so. Thucydides' generation lived through a life-and-death struggle waged almost continuously for twenty- seven years. A nation at war is always, more or less, in a fever ; ^ when the nation is intelligent and excitable by temperament, and the war is close at home, the fever will run high. For these twenty-seven years no Athenian mind was ever quite at rest. Not a record or document of this period but we find in it the mark of this unhealthiness, of nerves on the strain with watching, of the pulse which beats just too fast. Every capricious turn of good or ill luck in the struggle sent a thriU through their hearts. But, can we think that Thucydides would deliberately distort the facts of the occupation of Pylos, solely in order to illustirate the truth that accidents will happen? The question hai-dly needs an answer. No man of common intelligence could say to himself, ' In order to '■ Cf, ii. 8 ^ T« a\\fj 'F.?i\As anaaa fifriapos 5>' iwiovaaiv ruiv irpuiToiv iroA.eW. 96 THXJCYDIDES MYTHICUS slio'w how uncertain are the chances of war, I will describe a series of events not just as tJiey happened, but with the causal links, which would show that the events were not fortuitoxis, disguised and almost sujjpressed.' There were plenty of real instances of good and ill luck. What need of this perverse invention of a spurious one? Plainly, then, this is not a case of ' moralizing '; there is some other reason; and so we fall back on the hypothesis of ' malignity ■*. The malignity could only be directed either against Cleon, whose exploit at Sphacteria followed ou the occupation of Pylos, or against Athens. There is, on this supposition, some personal grudge, against the hated political opponent, or against the city which banished Thucydides. With regard to Cleon, this hypothesis will not fit the facts. The occupation of Pylos was the exploit not of Cleon, but of ^ Demosthenes. For Demosthenes, the only soldier of genius whom the Athenians could match with Brasidas, Thucydides consistently shows a marked admiration. The capture of Pylos was his master-stroke, and there was no motive for belittling the achievement. Cleon does not appear till later, when he goes to the scene of action and co-operates in the capture of Sphacteria. Malignity against him might be fully satisfied either by representing that subsequent operation as favoured by fortune or by attributing aU the skill involved in its success to his colleague, Demosthenes. Thucydides actually does both these things — whether from malignity or because he thought it was true, is no matter for our present problem. But a personal grudge against Cleon could not be satisfied, or be in question at all, in the earlier nan-ative of the seizure of Pylos. Was it, then, a grudge against Athens that moved him? Did he hate the city which condemned him to banishment for his failure at Amphipolis, and desire to represent — or rather to misrepresent — her most successful feat in the war as a mere stroke of luck ? This, wo believe, is an hypothesis which is now, reluctantly and with many attempts at pallia- tion, allowed to pass current. It cannot be so easily and certainly dismissed as the other suggestions. It is a possible THE LtrCK OF PYLOS 97 motive— possible, at least, to some men— and it ^vould account for those facts -we have hitherto considered. We cannot at this point finally disprove it ; the facts which it will not account for have yet to be discussed. But we do not J)elicve_ that any one who knows Thucydides is^J-eaHy satisfied. with imputing to him a motive which, candidly described, is dishonourable, ignoble, mean. The imputation does not fit in with our general impression from the rest of the History. If there is any one who is satisfied with it, we will ask him to read once more the story of the retreat from Syracuse. Wero those pages written by a man who hated Athens and triumphed in her fall? We cannot think of any other motive which could have induced Thucydides deliberately to represent as fortuitous a series of events which WSTufter some reflection, can see to have been in groat measure designed. We next observe that the supposition of ' malignity ' is itself based on the tacit assumption that Thucydides is writing from the same stand- point, and handling his story on the same methods, as a modern historian. If a modern had written the narrative of Pyloa, we could say with the highest degree of moral certainty, that the distortion was deliberate and the motive must be at least dishonest, if not ignobly personal. Hence we assume, unconsciously, that Thucydides' motive must have been of this sort. In our eagerness to hail him as ' a modern of the moderns ', we thought we were paying him a compliment ; but now the epithet turns out to carry with it a ijaost damaging accusation. If we decline to regard Thucydides as a modern, and recur to our thesis that, being an ancient, he must have looked at the course of human history with very difierent eyes from ours, it seems that an alternative explanation may yet remain. The suggestion which we would put forward is that Thucydides thought ho really saw an agency, called ' Fortune ', at work in these events. When we say ' chance favoured the designs of Demosthenes '^ of course we mean, not that any of ' BU17, nut ofQncce (1900), p. 429. H 9S THTJCYDIDES MYTHICUS the accidents had no natural causej but only that they were such as could not have been foreseen. But have we any ground for saying that this, and nothing more, was what Thucydides would have meant ? ' TVe will, for the moment, leave the notion of Fortune without precise definition. It is enough to take a belief in Fortune as meaning a belief in any non-natural agency, which breaks in, as it were, from outside and diverts the current of events, without itself being a part of the series or an effect determined by an antecedent member of it. Now, we have ah-eady pointed out that human actions are not to be fitted into such a series. Their only causes — if we are to speak of causes at all — are motives, each of which is itself uncaused by anything precedurg~it in time ; allhuman motives are absolute ' bejjinnings of motion '. A view of the universe in which this irruption of free human agency is tacitly assumed is at any i-ate illogical if it denies the possibility of similar irruptions into the course of Nature by non-human agencies. But we can go further than this. We observed that Thucydides had no word at all for *' cause ' in our sense. From the fact, among others, that instead of discussing the causes of the war-, he thought he had completely accounted for its origin when he had described the grievances (alriai) of the combatants, it appeared that it was not only the word that was missing, but the concept. Having no clear conception of cause and effect, he cannot have had any clear conception of a universal and exclusive reign of causal law in Nature. In criticizing Professor Gomperz we denied that Thucydides conceived the course of human affairs as ' a process of Nature informed by inexorable causality ', or as having anything in common with such a process. We may now further deny that he could have thought of the processes of Nature themselves as informed by causality, in our modern sense — the sense, namely, that every event has a place in one total series of all ' That Thucydides would havo mesnt just what wo mean is commonly as^ur.ied, as for instance by Mr. Forbes, Introduction to Book I (p. xxxii) : • Chance (that is, the operation of unknown causes) is strong, the future is hard to fore^eo, hope is dangerous ; wo must look facts in the face, whether we like them or not, and " think it out ".' THE LUCK OF PYLOS 99 events, and is completely determined by previous events, and so on backv7ards into infinity; and that this is true of the future as well as of the past. By an alria, in nature as in man, Thucydides does not mean a member of such a series, but a free agency, a ' beginning of motion ', an incursion of fresh oj'iginal power. If this is so, there was nothing whatever in his view of the universe to exclude the possibility of extra- ordinary intervention on the pai-t of some undefined non-human powers. We shall presently see that his language elsewhere implies that such a possibility was admitted by him. That Thucydides had, on the contrary, a quite definite notion of causal law is commonly taken for granted, or actually asserted. M. Croiset,^ for instance, after contrasting Thucydides with his predecessors, continues : ' De la sa conception de I'histoire. Si les faits sont lids par des lois permanentes et ndcessaires, la connaissance des causes et des effots dans le passd pent faire prdvoir le retour des memes effets, produits par les memes causes, selon la rfegle des choses humaines (xora rb avOpdirewv).' This passage suggests that Thucydides based his conception of history on a belief in permanent and necessary laws, connecting events in such a way that frovi a sufficient knowledge of the present state of tite world the future could be predicted with certainty. If this is true, it of course excludes the operation of Fortune. - Let us, however, examine the passages to which M. Croiset refers in his note, as the foundation of the above statement. The first is as follows : ' For recitation to an audience, perhaps the absence of the " mythical " will make these facts rather unattractive ; but it will be enough if they are judged useful by those who shall wish to know the plain truth of what has happened and of the events which, according to the course of human things, are likely to happen again, of the • Croisot, Hist, de la lit. grccgue, iv. 113. ^ Wo may note, by the way, that if Thucydides thought this, he had diacovored a truth of wliioh Aiistotlo was ignorant. The whole Aristotelian doctrine of Possibility rests on the logical thesis that propositions which rofor to future ovonts (e.g. ' there will be a battle to-morrow ') are neither true nor false, because, unless the future wore undetermined, 'nothing would happen by chance ' {anii rvxis) and all deliberation would bo futile. H 3 100 THTJCYDIDES MYTHICUS sa^ne, or mnjucTi tJie same, tsoH as these.' ^ What Thucydides here has in his mind, we know from the other passage to which M. Croiset refers.* Thucydides is there explaining why he gives an account of the outbreak of plague at Athens. 'Others may say, each according to his judgement, whether he be physician or layman, from what it probably arose, and assert that whatever he considers were the agencies of so gi-eat a change, iuere sufficient to acquire looiver to {pro~ (luce) the transformation-^ But I shall say what it was- like when it happened; and I shall set forth the'things from v:!dch; if it should ever come on aijain, one vjho considers them inigJd .lest be able, knowing them beforehand, to recognize it %vithout fail._ I fell ill myself, and I saw with my own eyes otliors sufTering.' Thucydides will record the symptoms of the plague, from personal observation,. . so that posterity may reco^gnize the disorder if' it should break out again. This- is all ho thinks useful.. . .He hints that the guesses of physicians are not worth -much more than those of layme^i, about the ' agencies responsible' which. they consider were 'sufficient to acquire •powep', to (produce) such a transformation '. -Had the man who wjote that phrase anything in his mind remotely re- -;sembling- the. modern notion of cause and causal law? ' The , phrase is the very contradiction of it. The notion it conveys i'is that of ah unknown, probably an unknov/ablo, something, ; -responsible for the plague, and from time to time acqui/ring 1 enough power to produce an outbreak. Thucydides. rejects all attempts to scrutinize the^ nature -of this something, and does not even directly comrnit himself to a belief in its existenpe. H-e will confine himself to describing what her actually saw and: suffered. He"' hints that other people, * i. 22. 4 . . . /ra2 Tuir )xt\K6rro)v vori oufts Karh ri divBp&neiOV rotoirm/. itai Tfipa/nXilfftanf tu€c6d. p. xxvii) riglitly observes that 'a rematk- ablo pos.sngo in Thucydides' contemporary, the piiysician Hippocratts, shows that we must not arguo too hastily from a rejection of superstitio-js explanations of particular phenomena. Speaking of a malady prevalent among some of tho Scytliians, lie says : of lilv oZv Imxiijp'oi riji' mrtrjv irpo/JTi&iaffi Otaif Kal aiPot/Tat Tovrovs tovs avOpw^ovs Kal-TrpoaKWiovijatoi yiyitTai. . , . ' ^ ' See ii. 58, 59, whore, -just after describing ^the severity of the plague, Thucydides says that the Athenians, hard pressed at onco by (i) the \\-ar, and (a) the plague, (i) blamed Pericles for tho war and (a) thought their misfortunes liad come on tliem ' on his account' {St' Ixitvov). Cf. ii. 64. 1. ' ' Nach dem L.iufo menschlicher Dinge ' — Classen, acf foe. • ii. 28 vovfi.r]v!<{ KarA ae\rii>rjy, Sianep ical nivov ZoKtl thai ylyvtaSai Smariv, 102 TJIUCyDIDES MYTHICUS eclipsed, it is full.^ He inferred, moreover, that eclipses could not, as superstitious men like Nikias supposed, give prognostications of coming events. But between an isolated obser^-ation and inference of this sort and a general conception of law in nature there -was a gulf -which many centuries of labour had yet to fill. In the case of earthquakes, Thucydidcs had no sufficient scries of observations on which to base an inference. Consequently, with admirable good sense, lie records, without expressing or implying any belief or dis- belief of his own, the one fact of which ho was certain, namely, that ' they were said and thought to bo signs of coming events '.^ .Again, when ho is insisting in his introduction that the Peloponnesian Wai- was the greatest in recorded history, he thinks it worth while to point out that it was not inferior to previous wars in the number of earthquakes, eclipses/ droughts, famines, plagues, and other such con- vulsions of nature which accompanied it. Similar phenomena had been reported of previous wars, but this hearsay was too scantil}' confirmed by ascertained facts. ' It noxu became •not irxredible,' ho says, 'for all these things came wpon the GreeJcs at the same time with this war.'* An unpre- judiced reader of this passage must draw several conclusions. In the first place Thucydides feels no distinction between famines and plagues on the one hand, and eclipses, earth- quakes, and droughts on the other. To us it seems easy to connect the former class with a state of war, and absolutely impossible to connect the latter. Second, he saw no reason » rii. 50. « ii. 8. 3. " His putting in 'eclipses' shows that he did not understand why the sun is not eclipsed at every new moon, oi' the moon every time it is full. He thought eclipses were more /'equent at times of war and did not know why. Ct Plut. Kic ixiii <5 73p vpZros aacpiaraTov re vivToiv KoX OappaXiinaTOV Trtpl oiXr/i't]! KaTavyaajjuv Koi axias Kdyov (h ypaipflv KaraOiiifvos 'Ava^aydpas out' airii^ ^v ToAcuJi oCtc o \6yo! tvSofoj &K\' ix&ppr^ot «ti koX 8i' iKlyoiir «ol lur (vKa0(laf TLVus ^ TTiaTfOis PaSl^ojv. * i. 23. 8 TO T€ Trpirtpov iico^ piiv Xiyupuva, Ipycp SI avaviiirffov PfPcuai/ttva ovx dmaTa Karlarrj, aetai^uiv rt vipi .... touto yip viyra luri. rovSe toD iroKlnov THE LUCK OF PYLOS 103 in the nature of things why events of either class should not bo more frequent at times of war in Greece, and ho thought the evidence pointed to tho fact that they wore. Third, if ho -was thinking at all of any sort of cauaal connexion between wars and (for instance) droughts, he must have attributed droughts to causes of a sort which find no place in modern science. Fourth, he shows his usual good sense in merely recording that these occurrences apparently came at tlta same time {&ixa.), without committing himself to any specific connexion between them. In fine, he sliows a com- pletely scientific spirit, and also an equally complete destitu- tion of a scientific view of nature. In tho former respect ho is superior to the man who sacrifices to a volcano or prays for rain. In the latter he is not so far advanced as a modern peasant who is just educated enough to feel that there can be no connexion between his seeing four magpies and some one else having a child, Thucydidcs will not icorsh ip the in- scrutable agencies responsible for convulsions of Nature ; but he cannot rule out the hypothesis that such ageneies exist and may ' acquire power ' to produce the convulsions coincidently with a war in Greece. He refrains from dog- matizing on either side ; regarding, we may suppose, the current belief that malevolent spirits were responsible for such outbreaks,^ as an incautious and unverified explanation. M. Croiset has, in our opinion, slipped into a fallacy which is so common in the written history of thought that it seems to deserve a name of its own. We will call it the Modernist Fallacy. It takes several kindred shapes. In the present case, its formula is as follows : ' If a man in the remote past believed a . certain proposition, he also believed aU that we • Porph. dd Abst, ii. 40 %v ykp 8^ koX toCto t^s iKylarr^i p\a$r]i t^s dni rniv Kaicoip-jSiv Zaijiivoiv Otrlcv, Sti auTol oltioi fiyviiieiioi tuiv irtpl Trjr ■y^x TTaOTiiAarav, oTov Kotiuiv, !i,(popiav, aitffituv, aiximv xal ruiv iftoiaiv . . . The belief, seriously untortaiued by this intolligont writer, has, of course, flourished to our own time in civilized countries. We remember an article in tho Spectator, in which tho writer argued that an o.irtliquako in the West Indies was designed by God to stimulate, soismological rosoarch. Neither tho editor nor the readers seem to have been conscious of any difficulty or impiety iu this opinion. 104; THUCYDIDES MYTHICXTS have since discovered to te implied in that proposition.' Thucydides believed — who ever did not?— that events of ' the same, or much the same, sort ' recur. Therefore, he must have had a full and conscious belief in permanent and neces- sary laws of cause and effect, conceived as we conceive them. Thucydides' notion of Fortune may be more closely defined by comparison and contrast with the opinions of the hardest and clearest thinker among his contemporaries. Socrates, • j.ccording to his friend Xenophon,^ believed that omens were signs £i-om the gods or 'the spiritual' (rb haiixoviov), and recommended the use of divination to determine actions of which the future results could not be foreseen. Those who refused to employ divination in such matters were, ho said, as much ' possessed by an evil spirit ' {laiiiovav) as those who did employ it in cases where ordinary human judgement (yici^i]) vrould have sufficed. He 'demonstrated' that men who supposed that the movements of the heavenly bodies happened 'by some sort of constraints' (tlo-Iv Aj^dyxats) were fools. He asked (as Thucydides might have asked) whether ' they thought they had by this time a sufficient knowledge of human things, that they should turn to think about such matters, neglecting v»'hat is human and theorizing about the divine '. Could they not see that it was impossible for men to discover such things? Those who most prided themselves on their theories disagreed with one another like so many madmen quarrelling over their various delusions. Did they expect, when they knew about divine things and by what sort of constraints ^ they happen, to be able to make winds and rains when they pleased ? Or were they content merely to know how these things happened ? The language here attributed to Socrates is religious; he speaks of ' the divine ' and ' the spiiitual ' (demonic). His view is that human events are determined partly by ' fore- sight' {yvajiT]) and partly by the agency of gods or spirits^ ^ Xen. Mem. i. 1. ' 'AvayKats as the context shows, moans ' constraints ' , such as a mngician claims to exercise in rain-making. THE LUCK OP PYLOS 103 Foresight must be used to the utmost ; but when it fails, -we ought to resort to divination, the only means of discovering the intentions of the other set of agencies. Thucydides, -when lie is expressing his own opinions, does not speak of 'the divine', but merely of Fortune {Tvxn)- I^ut both men are alike in contrasting the field of ordinary human foresight {yvmij-ri) with the unknown field, which lies beyond it, of inscrutable, non-human powers, whether wo call these gods and spirits or simply Fortune. This antithesis is more frequently in Thucydides' thoughts than any other except the famous contrast of ' word ' and ' deed '. The two factors— -yroj/x?;, human foresight, purpose, motive, and Tu^?/, unforeseen non- human agencies — fj.r) over which he has complete control, and Fortune over which he has no control at all.^ Men may be ruined by fortune (rats Tvy^ais), but if they are steadfast in purpose (yvdnais), they have shown themselves true men.^ Pericles^ says that human designs and the issues of events alilce take a course which is hard to discern ; ' and hence we commonly regard Fortune as responsible for what* ever falls out contrary to calculation.' Of the plague, Pericles says* that it was the only thing that had so far happened in the course of tho war ' beyond any man's expectation'. He knows he is hated the more because of it ; * but this is not fair unless he is to be given credit for unforeseen success as well. ' Divine things (ra haLtJ^ovLa) must be borne as a matter ^ iv. 64. 1 e.g. (Hormocrates) /ii/SJ /impfa ^AovixSJi f/yuuBai r^r re oUelas ■yvi^ijs iiiolcas airroxpaTup ehai xal rJ! ovk ap^ai IvxV '• ^^- ''8. 2 ov yip ol6v rt a/M TTji T ImOvii'iM Kat T^s Tuxi?' Tuv aiiriiv iitotus Ta/uav ytviaSai. 2 i. 87. 2 (roloponnosi.in generals). ' i. 140. 1 ivSixerai yelp rds (vH(popAs tuiv irpayn&Toiv oix ^Cffov d/ia^u); xo'P?"'" fl ital th Siavolai rod Mpirnov 8i' Zirtp xai rfjv yixrjv, Stro av rrapA Kuyov fv/j^3, fl^Qafifv tuTtaaOai, * ii. C4. • Owing to the Alcmaeonid curse, see p. 101. 106 THtrCYDIDES MYTPIICUS of necessity.' He does not argue that the plague cannot he his fault ; he speaks of it as a 'divine thing' -which he could not be expected to foresee. He may, of course, be talking do-tvn to his audience; in using the phrase to. bai/j-ovLa he probably is doing so. But what proof is there that he did not think of the outbreak as a stroke of some unknown power, which it would be rash to call by any more definite name than ' Fortune ' ? There is no need to multiply instances. An examination of all the important passages where this contrast occurs ^ has convinced us that Thucydides does not mean by ' Fortune ' simply ' the operation of unknown (natural) causes ', the working of ordinary causal law in the universe. He is thinking of extraordinary, sudden interventions of non-human agencies, occurring eEpecially at critical moments in warfare, or manifest from time to time in convulsions of Nature. It is these irruptions, and not the normal sway of ' necessary and permanent laws ', which defeat the purposes of human yvu>ij.rj, i and together with yr/w/xTj are the sole determinant factors in a series of human events. The normal, ordinary course of I^ature attracts no attention and is not felt to need explana-l tion or to be relevant in any way to human action. When I he speaks of the future as uncertain, he means not merely that it is unknown, but that it is undetermined, and that human design cannot be sure of completely controlling human events, because other unknown and incalculable agencies may at any moment intervene. TThat were the possible alternatives in an age which lacked the true conception of universal causality ? There were two, and only two : Fate and Providence. But both of these were mythical, and associated with superstition. Fate, the older, vaguer, and less personal of the two, was conceived under the aspect of veiled and awful figures : the three Moirai, Ananke, Adrasteia. It was thus that man had his first dim apprehen- sion of that element in the world outside which opposes the will of men and even of gods, thwarts their purpose, and ^ The references will be found in Classen's Introduction to Book I, p. xUv. THE LUCK OF PYLOS 107 beats down their passion. Later ages have at last resolved this inexorable phantom into nothing more— if nothing less- mysterious than the causal sequences o|^La^_EutJ;his«elution lay far in the future ; Thucydides' contemporaries could con- ceive it only as a non-human will— a. purely mythical entity. The other alternative was Providence ; but any conception of Providence less anthropomorphic than the will of Zeus or the agency of spirits was not possible as yet. The notion of a supreme Mind intervening once, and only once, to bring order into chaos had been reached by Anaxagoras ; but this suggestion, so disastrous to the progress of thought, was not developed till Plato took it up. In any case this Mind was merely credited with an initial act of creation ; it did not rule the world which it had ordered. Thucydides, moreover, as we saw. Lad probably considered and rejected Anaxagoras' philosophy. And, after all, the 'Mind ' was just as mythical as Fate. The word ' Chance ' suggests to the modern educated in- telligence something utterly impersonal; we think at once of the mathematical theory of probability, of the odds at £f gambling table, and so on. But we must remember that the current name for 'Chance' in Greek was the name of a mythica,l Person, Tixj], a spirit who was actually worshipped by the supers citious, and placated by magical means. The religious spoke of ' the Fortune that comes from the divine ', and believed that God's will was manifest in the striking turns of chance, and in spite of appearances was working for the righteous.* A less definite belief in Fortune as a divine or spiritual agency was thought worthy of mention by Aristotle.^ In his own discussion of ' what comes by fortune * or ' spontaneously ', Aristotle starts from the very contrast we have noted in Thucydides — the contrast between purpose (no1>- Law) and chance. Aristotle, moreover, has no belter explana- tion of Chance than one which involves the purposes of 'v. 104 ^Wo Molians) ■niarfvoiiev ry Tvxg in tov Seiov ni) kKaacaiataBai, on offiot Ttpiii ov StKoiovs ior&ixiOa, ^ Fhys. f i. 100 b 5 ilal S{ rtva oTs SoKct tTvai ahia itiv fj Tiix"), aS^Xos !J ay$pamvi[i iiavot<} wr S(T6y ti oIito xal taijxoviiiTtpov, 108 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS a Tnythical person, called Nature. He does not even approacli to the conception of causal law, but accounts for ' chance ' by the crossing and conflict of these imaginary purposes.' Thucy- dides, who either had never considered or had definitely rejected the notion of purposes in Nature, was even less advanced. He had no explanation to give, and confines himself to the most non-committal namo for these invading agencies — ' Fortune '. The recognition of non-human agencies — however unde- fined — as responsible for observed phenomena is, so far as it goes, a metaphysical belief. It is not a scientific belief, though perfectly consistent mth the scientific spirit in the then state of physical knowledge. It is not a religious belief; for Thucydides does not imply that these powers ought to bo worshipped or placated. Nothing remains but to call it mythical. , To recur now to the story of Fylos. We noticed that the series of lucky accidents on the Athenian side was paralleled by a series of extraordinary blunders on the Spartan side. In the former series Fortune is prominent to the exclusion of foresight (yrcuftTj) ; in the latter we see successive failures of foresight rather than the intervention of Fortune. These count as pieces of luck from the Athenian standpoint ; but from the Spartans' they are simply errors of judgement. This point is cleai-ly made in the subsequent speech of the Spartan envoys, who are careful to remark : ' We have not come to this from want of power, nor yet from the pride that comes when power is unduly increased ; but without any change in our position, we failed, in judgement — a point in which the position of all men is alike.'^ Thus the whole naiTative of the occu- pation illustrates the contrast of fortune and foresight. Fortune, not foresight, has exalted the Athenians ; want of ■ foresight, not of fortune, has depressed the Spartans. / It was in this light that Thucydides saw a series of events ■ ■ ^ de An, 434 a 31 tvaci. tou vavTa viripx" ''^ i>va(i, ^ av/iirTiiitara iarai tSiv iVOia rov. ^ iv. 18. 2. A translation of this speech wili ba found on p. 111. THE LUCK OF PYLOS 109 wiiich began ■with a striking accident, the storm. The element of real luck was sufficient to suggest a belief that Fortune was active to a mind predisposed by superstition or some other cause to look for her agency just here. Thucydides was not superstitious ; and he was both careful and acute. The belief accounts for the peculiarities of the narrative ; but we have further to account for his having the belief at just this moment in Ida story so strongly upon him as to miss the clues in his informant's report. There must have been something which positively predisposed him to see Fortune at work. We shall explain in the next chapter what this something was. Here wo- need only add that the psychological phenomenon we are supposing to have occurred in his mind is closely analogous to what might occur in a Christian historian, narrating from incomplete oral information a critical in- cident in Church history, which began with a Tuiracle. Looking from the outset for the divine purpose, he might easily fail to bring his mind to bear critically on the in- dications which showed that the whole series of events could bo explained as the effect of purely natural causes ; for we know from daily experience that a belief in occasional interferences on the part of Providence can co-exist in the same educated mind with a conception of natural causality immeasurably clearer than any that Thucydides could have possessed. CHAPTER VII THE MOST VIOLENT. OF THE CITIZENS. In this chapter we propose to take up the narrative where ■we left it after the occupation of Pylos, We have reached the point where Cleon comes into the story. "We shall mark the . circumstances of his entrance, and bring together the Other episodes in which. Thucydides allows him to appear before' us. The h3rpothesis of ' malignity ' would, not account for the peculiarities we noted in the earlier naiTative where Cleon was not concerned ; -but it. is not finally disposed of as' an explanation of the story .of Sphactefia, where Cleon is very much concerned. And malignity against Athens as a 'whole still stands as a theoiy alternative to- the view we expre.ssed in the last chapter. The occupation of Pylos .was not an. exploit of Cleon's ;but it v/as an exploit of thoX, Athenians. . To rcpl-esent it as a stroke of mere luck might" be a means of detra;cting (at the expense, by the way, of De'mostbenes' reputation) from the glory of Athens. Those-' imputations, so damaging to. Thucydides' character, so im- probable as they seem to us, are. still not disproved. We resume the narrative, then, giving as before an abbreviated . summary, designed, to preserve the points' which seem relevant to our problem.- That problem is to discover, if we can, something in Thucydides' thoughts about these transactions which will explain how he can have been,- as we suggested,. positively predisposed to see the work of Fortune in the early part of them. We shall find an influence at' work in his mind, the nature of which it will be fairer not to characterize until we have laid the relevant facts before the. reader's judgement. The news came to L'acedaemon that the Pcloponnesian fleet THE MOST VIOLENT. OF THE CITIZENS 111 •was sunk or captured, and that four hundred and twenty 'Spartan citizens -with their attendant helots were cut off on the island, under close watch from the Athenian ships cruising perpetually round it.^ The magistrates were sent to the scene of action, that no time might be lost.. They found that a rescue was impossible. Even if no attack were made, starvation would speedily reduce the garrison of a desert island, strewn with rocks and overgrown through most of its extent with forest. They obtained a truce from the enemy, and sent envoys to Athens with overtures of peace. The envoys addressed the Athenian assembly to the follow- ing effect:^ ' Men of Athens, the Lacedaemonians have sent us to treat about our men on the island, and to persuade you to such terms as ms.y at once be advantageous to you and, so far as the case allows, save our honour in this reverse. If we speak at some length, this will be no breach of our national custom. . For though it is not our way to use many words when a few will suffice, we can me more when there is an opportunity to effect what -is wanted, by setting forth some matters that are pertinent. You must not take them in an unfriendly way,- or "as if we w o'e schooling your dullness ; but think of us as .putting ycu in mind of what you know already to be good counsel. 'You have the opportunity of disposing well of the good fortune wbich now is with you, keeping the advantage you have won, and gaining as' well respect and high fame. You may escape what happens to men when .they obtain some good which is out of- the ordinary: they are always coveting more in, hope, hecause tlielr present good fo^ tune llkevAse v:as unexpected.^ But those who have oftenest. come in for the up.s and downs have good reason to be above all mistrustful of their successes. Your city, no less than. ours, iday very » iv. 14. 5 ff ? iv. 17 ff. Tho first iialf of tho speech is translated verbatim. ' iv. 17. i aid yAp tou rKiovos «Airi5i iflyovTcu. Sid tu koX rd itapuvra iSax^ToK furu)(^aai. 112 THUCYDIDES MYTHICL'S ■well have leamt this by experience. You may read the lesson again by looking closely at our present misfortunes, •when we who have the highest repute among the Hellenes come before you and here make requests which formerly we thought om-selves more in the position to grant. But note that we have not come to this from want of power nor yet from the pride that comes when power is unduly increased ; but, without any change in our position, we failed in judge- ment {yvdjiri) — a point in which the position of all men is alike. Therefore you too have no reason to think, because your city is now strong in itself and in its new acquisitions, that the hand of Fortune (to r^y T^xjis) also will always bo on your side. Wise men find safety in setting down their gains to uncertainty — it is they who will meet misfortunes too with sober foresight^-and know that war docs not wait upon a man's choice of this or that enterprise to take in hand, but goes a,3 the chances (al rvxai), here or there, may lead. Such men are least of all likely to trip ; and not being elated by confidence that their footing in the. struggle is sure, they will be most disposed to end it in the hour of their good fortune. And this is how you, Athenians, would do well to deal with us, to prevent its being thought at some future day, if ever you should reject us and fall into one of the many possible disasters, that your advantage now, when all has gone well with you, was due to fortune (ttJx??) ; whereas you may, if you choose, leave to later times a reputation for strenp(fO!fro. . ' jv. 122. 6. ^ V. 7. 3 iy(fiiaaT6 t5 rpivcf ^tref koX h -rfiv Xlv'/^v ftmrxiiaas iiriarivai Tt ^pOV£LV, THE MOST VIOLENT Or THE CITIZENS 119 better stand, and though Cleon, who indeed had never thought of holding his ground, fled immediately and was overtakeft by a Myrkinian targetcer and slain, the rest rallied on the crest of the hill and repulsed Clearidas two or three times, and they did not give in until the Myrkinian and Chalcidian horse and the targetecrs hemmed them round and broke them with a shower of darts.' ^ Thus contemptuously is Cleon's end recorded : the victor of Sphacteria is spumed . out of the history in a parenthesis. Mad elation and self- confidence, born of unexpected luck, have brought him to the ignominious death of a coward. The first of these incidents which calls for remark is the speech of the Spartan envoys in the abortive negotiations for peace which came between the occupation of Pylos and the . capture of Sphacteria. This speech, half of which wc trans- lated, is a curious document. We remember that Thucydides in the introduction to the History - remarked with regret on the difficulty of remembering or learning by report the exact words used by statesmen and envoys. The speeches set down represent, he told us, ' what seemed to me to be just what would have been necessary for each speaker to say on the occasion, and I have kept as closely as possible to the general sense of the actual words.' In the present instance it is obvious that in a way the ' general sense ' of the envoys' pica has been preserved. They must have formulated the Spartans' request for peace, asked for the release of the prisoners, and . hinted — they could do no more till they had some certainty of success — that the ' friendship of Sparta ', the only quid pro quo openly named, would turn out to cover some more tougible return. From our knowledge of Laconian eloquence and from examples of it elsewhere in Thucydides,^ we should expect ' y. 10. 9. ' The following ore the other spoeche3 made by Spartans in the first part of tho history; (i) Archidamus advises delay in going to war, i. SO-5 (strictly to tho point ; short eulogy of Spartan institutions, SI) ; (2) Sthene- laidas, i. 8C (extremely curt) ; (3) Archidamus to Peloponnesian generals, ii. H (short and businesslike); (4) Archidamus to Plataeaus, ii. 72 (a few 120 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS further a few crisp, dry aphorisms about luck : ' To-day to me, to-morrow to theo.' The situation itself, as we are later told, precluded any definite statement about the only question of practical business : what substantial equivalent the Spar- tans had to offer in exchange for the prisoners. In such, circumstances, the whole' case might bo put in three minutes; ■ we do not expect a homily, five-sixths of which are devoted to a general disquisition on the theme of moderation in prosperity. Nothing could be less ' laconic ' than the speech 1 Thucydides has given us. Further, he -was quite aware of this, and knew that his readers would remark it. The exordium apologizes for what may seem a departure from national custom: 'It isnot our: way to use many words when, few will suffice'; but the justification offered: 'wo can use more when there is an opportunity to effect what is wanted by setting forth some matters. that are pertinent,' sounds vague and indeed (to be candid) all. but meaningless in -the mouths of the speakers. We suspect, that the matters to i)C set. forth are more to the point in explaining what Thucydides has in his mind thaiiln influencing the Athenians to abandon the fruits -of victory. There is obviously some connexion 'between the sacrifice of di-amatic probability hero iaind the sacrifice -of historic probability in the Pylos episode. In the ■ handling of ' what was done ' Thucydides has presented the action as undesigned and fortuitous. In the speech we have a dissertation" onluck in war and moderation in unlooked-for success. The Lacedaemonians, we shall "oe told, are ' moralizing '. Ji. sudden reversal of fortune was iri itself a phenomenon peculiarly interesting to th.e Greek mind, and the theme of m.oderation in prosperity was the standing moral which they drew from such occurrences — a most venerable' cojnm.onplaco. sentences); (5) Brasidas at Acanthus, iv, 85 (length apologized for by Thucydides: 'for a Lacedaemonian, ho was not an incapable speaker,' 8=^; 2)'; (6) Brasidas to his men, ir. 126 (short and. pointed) ; (7) Brasidas to his men, v. 9 (similar to the last). None of them presents a parallel to that of the envoys on this oijeasion. THE MOST "VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS 121 That, of course, is true ; but it does not explain the problem of the Pyloa narrative. If that -were all, vfo should have to suppose that Thucydides distorted his facts there for the purpose of moralizing— a supposition we have proved in- credible. Lot us say, then, that Thucydides is using the device of •speech-'wfiting to convey his own opinion that Athens ought to have made peace after Sphacteria, and that Cleon's exorbitant demands were a mistake in policy. This certainly was Thucydides' opinion ; but again it gives.no. answer to our problem. The policy was just, as bad, whether the occupation of Pylos was. casual or carefully designed in every detail. It is evident that the moral of the speech was, to Thucy- dides' view, illustrated by the subsequent career of Cleon. He behaved at Amphipolis ' as he had done at Pylos, where his good luck had given him confidence in his own wisdom '. 'He never so much as expected that any one would come out to fight him ', and so on. We are to understand that Cleon's head was turned by the success of his ' mad ' -undertaking. -Elated and over-confident, he rushes into a still more difficult enterprise. That is how we put it in our histories; but the Greeks used a somewhat different language, and put a some- what different construction on such a sequence of events as this. They interpreted it according to a certain philosophy Oihuinan nature which it will concern us to take account of. If we tiirn back to the episode in which Cleon makes his first " appearance in the History, we fiLnd this philosophy set forth in remarkable terms by. Diodotus in the Mytilencan debate, Diodotus is replying to 4he groat speech .of Cleon which wo referred " to above ; ho o~xplains how futile is Cleon's policy of inflicting exemplary punishment on revolted allies. The question of the. purpose and true, nature of punitive justice was. much in the air at this time, and the speech of Diodotus is Thucydides' contribution to the con- troversy. The passage is so interesting, and so important for our purpose, that we. will give it in full. ' In the cities of Greece the death penalty has been afExed to many offences actually less than this ; yet stiU, intoxicated 122 THUCTDIDES MYTHICUS bj their hopes, men take the risk.^ No man ever, before embarking on a dangerous course, passed sentence on himself that he would not succeed in his design ; and no city enter- ing on revolt ever set about doing so with the conviction that her resoui-ces^whether her own or obtained from her allies — were inadequate. All men are boi-n to eri'or in public, as in private,, conduct ; and there is no law that will hinder them ; •for mankind has exhausted the whole catalogue of penalties, continuall}'- adding fresh ones, to find some moans of lessening the wrongs they suffer from evil-doers. Probably in early ages the punishments afBxed to the worst offences \5pr0 milder ; but as transgressions went on, in time they seldom stopped short of death ; yet still, even so, thoro are trans- gressors. ' Either then some greater terror than death must be dis- covered, or at any rate death is no deterrent. No ; poverty inspires daring by the stress of necessity ; the licence of prosperity inspires covetous ambition by insolence and pride ; and the other conditions of human life, as each is possessed by some irremediable and mastering power, by passion lead men on to perilous issues. ' Desire and Hope are |ievcr wantlng^-tho one leading the way, the other busy in attendance. Desire devising the attempt, and Hope flattering with suggestions of the riches in Fortune's store, very often lead to ruin, and, invisible as they are, prevail over the dangers that are seen. ' And besides these Fortune contributes no less to intoxi- cation ; for sometimes she presents herself unexpectedly at a man's side and leads him forward to face danger at a dis- advantage ; and cities even more than individuals, in propor- tion as their stake is the greatest of all — freedom or empire — and each, when all are with him, unthinkingly rates himself the higher.^ ' JiL 45. 1 t5 eXiriJj Ivatpiiuvoi KivSmdovm. ' iii. 45. 4 4AA' r) /xiv vevla avifx^ t^v rik/xav vaplxov(Ta, fj tl i(ovcia vSpti TJ)!' TT\(oy((iay ital ippov^fiari, al S' (JXAai fwrux'oi ipyy tuiv avVpirnaiv ui! iK&art} tl! iriiTfXETtu vn ayT]Kearov Tjcir xpftaaoyos i^iyovaiv h tovs kivSvvovs, Tj re TX-nh xai u 'Epas ivl navri, i /ilv ilyoiitevos, ^ 8" i(pewon(yii, not i fiiv THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS 123 ' In a word, it is impossible— and only a simpleton would suppose the contrary — that human nature, when it is passion- ately bent upon some act, should be averted from its purpose by force of laws or any other terror.'' Wo shall have something to say later of the extraordinary and. highly poetical language in which this theory of human nature is set forth ; hero we shall note the main features of the theory itself, the far-reaching significance of which will become apparent in the sequel. We observo that human nature is subject to two sorts of influences, which con-cspond to the two general names yrriS/jn; (in the widest sense) and Tyxn- (1) There are,. first, the man's own vices of character — 'daring, covetousness, pride ' and the other 'iixemedialjle and mastering powers ' which ' possess ' him. (2) These vices, in the second place, arc ' supplied ' or inspired by the external circumstances of his condition {^wTv-j^ia) — especially by the two extreme conditions of grinding poverty and licentious prosperity. Next, in these conditions man is peculiarly liable to. tcm2:>tutton, which comes to him in two ways. (1) One of two violent 'jMnirions may seize on him. Hope is busy in attendance flattering him with suggestions of the wealth in Fortune's store; unrestrained Desire leads him on to lay plans for yet further gain. (2) Fortune, herself, intervenes to complete his intoxication. Appearing at his side unexpectedly, she encourages him by giving success which, though, he has not designed it, ho is apt to credit to his own • ability. So he comes to overrate his strength, and face dangers which are beyond it. In this scheme the two factors, human character and TJ^i* fmpovXijv iKt^povTi^aiv, ^ 8e r^v (ivoplav Trji Tvxis ' VTroTtOucra, nKfTara P\i- iiaX j) Tiix"? i'"' atroU oii\v (\aaaov (vfipiWtTat . h ri imtpttv iSof^ai! yap tcriv Zrt napiaTa^ipr) teal iK tuiv vno^ttctripoiv Htvhvvivtiv rivd, npoay*t' Kal ovx Jjaaov ris trcjAfit, Say TtfpX ruiv fity'wToiv t«, iXtvBtplai tj SXXwv apxvf, itai fttri i:6.VToiv tttacvoi rlAo'yio'Tais ^Trt vXiov n avr^f i^u^aaty, Tlio montiing of the la.st clause seems to he tlmt intoxication is infectious : each man in a crowil is moro carried away tlian ho would bo if he wore alono. For the construction oi/Tcli' iSi^aafv compare Plato, Phikbus, 48 E. 124 THUCYDIDES MyTHICUS external Fortune, appear twice over, in different aspects. First, -n-e are thinking of comparatively permanent conditions, puch as extreme poverty or wealth, and of the comparatively permanent vices which gain, upon a man slowly in such circumstances. Second, we have the sudden access, at critical moments, of temptation under the two forms of a violent passion, Hope or Desire, and of Fortune appearing in un- expected successes. These besetting agencies take advantage of the faults of character already produced by Prosperity and Penury, and they bring about a condition of blind intoxica- tion, the eclipse of rational foresight. When this state is reached the man is marked for his doom; neither the force of laws nor any other terror will ' avert ' his fatal course. The point which now concerns us is that the train of thougit in these few sentences of Diodotus' speech contains the motive and the moral of the vjholc of Clean's career as Tliucydides lias chosen to i:)resent it. We know, from other sources, that Cleon was prominent in politics before the war broke out. After Pericles' death he soon became the leading Athenian statesman and remained so to the end of his life. During all this time he appears to have led the policy of tho TpaF-pai-ty,~and^ in a history of the war we should expect to hear of him constantly. But out of all his public actions Thucydides has selected three, and only three,^ to put before us. These are the Mytilenean debate ; the capture of Sphac- teria^nd the negotiations preceding it ; his last campaign at Amphipolis. On the first of these occasions Thucydides puts . in his mouth a speech which is evidently meant to reveal tho character of the ' most violent of the citizens ' ; one of the vices of prosperity, ruthless ' insolence ' (t5/3/>ts), might be taken as its keynote. On the second occasion, at Sphacteria, we see him at a moment when Fortnne, the temptress, unexpectedly stands at his side. His promise was 'mad' for he was intoxicated with ambitious passion, and he had just betrayed another vice of prosperity, ' covetousness ' (wXeove^^a). Thucy- ^ Except the glimpse at iv. 122. 6 where Cleon advocates the massacre of the Skioneans. This repeats and renews the impression of tho Mytilenean debate. THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZENS 125 diJes reiterates in the envoys' un-laconie speech just that part of his theory of human nature which is relevant — the danger of covetousness in the flush of success. In the third and last episode, at Amphipolis, Thucydides in his own person points out that his train of causes' has led to its inevitable end. Infatuate pride (fpovrjixa), the third vice of prosperity, biings ruin. The three episodes, put together, form the complete outline ef a drama, conforming to a wsll-known type which we shall study in the next chapter. The first act reveals the hero's character ; the second contains the crisis ; the third, the I catastrophe. But though complete in outline, the drama is obviously defective in other respects. The reason is that, while the plot is tragic, Cleon is not a tragic figure. It is true that at his first appearaace> in the Mytilenean speech, he does attain tragic proportions, for the character is treated with perfect seriousness and expressed with astonishing force. But to allow Cleon to remain on this level would have been fatal to Thucydides' larger design, which we shall study later ; it would never do to let him become the hero of this pai-t of the war. Besides, Thucydides could not conceal his contempt, and probably saw no reason to conceal it. On both these grounds he does not allow Cleon a second full-length speech. Modern historians complain that Thucydides ought to have given his reply to the Spartan envoys before Sphacteria ; that ho has missed an obvious opportunity of stating the policy of the war-party ; and that there is some unfairness in not doing so. But artistic considerations were decisive. A long speech from Cleon at this point, if it even approached the force and impressiveness of the Mytilenean speech, would have established him as a hero, or a villain on the heroic scale ; he would have bulked much too largely for a minor character. Hence Gleon'a little personal drama, though its plot is kept complete, is deliberately spoilt ; — 'laughter seized the Athenians at his wild words.' From that moment he is dewraded from the tragic rank ; and his story runs out pitiably to its contemptible close — in a parenthesis. What immediately concerns us now is the difierenco that 126 THUCYDIDE3 MYTHICUS tMs dramatizing of Cleon must make to our view of Thucy- dides' treatment of him. It is evident that the historian saw him not pm-ely, or even primarily, as an historic person, but as a type of character. His career is seen through the medium of a preconceived theory of human nature, and only that part of the career is presented which conforms to the theory and illustrates a certain part of it. Tlie principle of this selection has no place in historic method ; it has no place in Thucydides' original design of a detailed journal of the war. The MytUenean episode, for instance, shows us Cleon at a moment when his action had no effect on the course of the war, since his advice was rejected. The principle is artistic, idealizing, dramatic. Thucydides has stripped away | all . the accidents and particulars of the historic individual ; , he has even stripped away his personality, leaving only an-- abstsgcfc, generalized type. Now, wo do not deny that Thucydides bothliated and despised the man Cleon; or that these feelings operated as a psychological cause to facilitate tli° erection of their object into an impersonation of insolent Violence and Covetousness. But when this result was effected, the attitude of feeling must have undergone a simultaneous change. To idealize is an act of imaginative [ ci-eation, and the creator cannot feel towards the creature as ■ one man feels towards another. He is a spectator, not an actor in the drama revealed to his larger vision. We need ? talk no longer of ' a personal grudge against an able, but ■ coarse, noisy, ill-bred, audacious man ' ; for none of these epithets, except * able ', quite fits the impression we get from *ithe ilytilenean speech. Nor is it even a man, a complete concrete personality, that is there presented ; it is rather a s}-mbol, an idea. The personality is contem.ned and thrust out, and with its banishment personal antipathy gives place to a noble indignation against Violence itself — avrd ro fiCaiov, as Plato might call it. We have left the plane of pedestrian history for the ' more serious and philosophic ' plane of ' poetry. We have here reached a broad distinction of type between THE MOST VIOLENT OF THE CITIZE^^S^^ 127 1 Thucydides' -work and history as it -was written in the nineteenth century. The latter can be described generally as realistic, if wo stretch this term to cover both the scientific (and sometimes dull) school and their graxjhic (and sometimes inaccurate) rivals. The scientific principle is realistic in the sense that it tends to regard any ascertainable fact as worth ascertaining, and even as neither more nor less valuable than any other. The graphic principle is realistic in that it attempts to visualize the past, and is as careful to tell us that Kobesplerre was sea-green as itr is to tell us that he was incorruptible. The realism which has grown upon the novel and the drama has taught us that to see a man's exterior is halfway to understanding his character. Hence the graphic school delight in personal, biographical touches ; and in delineating an age they find a broadside or a folk-song more illuminating than the contents of a minister's dispatch-box. ■, Now Thucydides belongs to neither of these schools; or rather he tried to be scientific and hoped to be dull, but ho failed. As his work goes on the principle that governs his Bcleeticn and his presentation of events is less and less scientific. He originally meant to choose the facts which would be useful in the vulgar practical sense ; he projected a descri]:)tive textbook in strategy. But he ended by choosing those v/hich were useful for a very different end — a lesson in morality ; and he comes, as we shall see, to treat events out of all proportion to their significance as moments in a war between Athens and Sparta. The gi-aphic method he keeps strictly for events, not for persons. The fortification of Pylos, for instance, is vividly pictured in a single sentence describing the mudlarks. Imagination, with this sharply defined glimpse of the thing seen to work from, can fill in all the rest. But the characters are never treated graphically ; he does not tell us that Cleon was a tanner with a voice like Kykloboros, or that Pericles was called ' squill-head ' from the shape of his skull. He tells us that the former -was the 'most violent', the latter the ' most powerful ' of the citizens. The characters throughout are idealized to a very high degree of abstraction —a method which is not practised by either school of moderns. 128 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS Our attention in the next chapter will be directed to a closer analysis of this idealistic treatment. We shall study the method still as exemplified in the story of Cleon ; but, as we have said, Cleon is not the hero of the history as a whole, or even of this part of it ; the cycle of his fortunes is only an epicycle on a larger orbit. But orbit and epicycle exhibit the same type of curve. We have to trace this curve in both and also to study the relation of the smaller body to the greater. Cleon, in other words, has two aspects : he is quasi-hero of his own little tragi-comedy and also a minor character in the tragedy of Athens. CHAPTER VIII MYTHISTORIA AND THE DRAMA The epithet 'dramatic' has often been applied to Thucy- dides' work; but usually nothing more is meant than that he allo-ws his persons to speak for themselves, and presents their character with vividness.^ The dramatization which we have pointed out in the treatment of Cleon is a very different thing; it is a principle of construction which, ' wherever it operates, determines the selection of incidents to be recorded^ and the proportions and perspective assigned them. In this chapter wo shall attempt to describe and analyse the type of drama that we have to do with, and to trace the literary influence under which Thucydides worked. We ought first, perhaps, to meet a possible objection. It may be urged that Thucydides in his preface expressly ex- cludes anything of the nature of poetical construction from his literal record of what was said and what was done. He criticizes the methods of poets and story-writers, and warns us that, at the cost of making h^is story ' somewhat un- attractive', he intends to exclude 'the mythical' (r6 ixvOoibes). He cannot, therefore, it might be imeired, have done what we have thought we found him doing. But we would ask for a careful examination of the passage in question. What was in Thucydides' thoughts when he wrote it, and above all, what precisely did he mean to exclude when he banished ' the mythical ' ? The words occur towards the end of the introduction,' ' This socras to bo all that Plutarch moans : i QovguSiSris itl r^ \071j) ■np!i! rainiv a/itWarai ri]V iva/rifdav, olov etarrpi iro<^ffo< rbv wcfoaTfjV, de Glor. Ath. 3. » i. 1-23. ISO THXJCYDIDES MYTHICUS vrhioli is designed to establish Thucydides' belief that the Peloponnesian war was the most memorable of all that had ever been in Greece.. The possible rivals, ho points out, are the Trojan war and the Persian invasion. For the first of these events the only literary evidence we have is that of the epic poets, and chiefly of Homer, whose record cannot be checked by direct observation, while much' of his theme through the lapse of time has passed, or ' won over ', into ■ the region of the mythical and incredible.^ The only, tests we have ai"e certain indications in the' existing condition of Greece which seem inconsistent with the past state of things as represented by the literary authorities. . With these indica- tions we must be content ; and, t"hey suffice to show that the epic poets embellished their tale by exaggeration.^ The . story- writers, agaiji, on whom we depend for the history of '.. the Persian wars, were not bent upon accurate statement of truth; — witness the carelessness of- Herodotus about points of detail. Their object was rather^o make their recitations attractive and amusing to. their audience ; and if we discount their. evidence. ai3cordingly, we shall fiflid, going- by ascertained facts alone, that the Peloponnesian war was the greatest ever seen. Thucydides. next passes abruptly to the formulation of his own -method; he intends to record what was said and what was done as accurately and literally as possible. The result, he then- reinarks, will probably be' somewhat unattractive to. an audience- at a recitatJOD,"because- the facts recorded will, have nothing 'mythical' about them;* he will be contentj however, if they are judged useful by people who wi.sh to know the plain truth of what happened. The phrase 'winning over into the mythical ' is illuminating. It suggests the. transformation which begins- to steal over all L events from the moment of their occurrence, unless they are/ ' £. 21 TO TioW^ -JjrS xpivcv airuiv iirtcTTcis ivl ri /ivBloSes ixvfVtKriK&Td. , ' 5. 21 ill iroiTjToJ v/ivTiKaai vipl airav iirl rh utt^ov Koffftovvres. Cf. i. 10. 3 T? 'O/iTipov jroiijo-fi, ti Ti XP^ KivravOa mareveiv, iv ilxbi M t6 ituiov fiiy TciijTT^iV CvTa Koa/i^aou, * L 22. 4 ical is liiv iKpCaffiyiaois rb ftri fivBuiSis axirwv irtpitlartpoy (pavtirat , . . MYTHISTOEIA AND THE DRAMA 131 arrested and pinned down in writing by an alert and trained observer. Even then some selection cannot be avoided— a selection, moreover, determined by irrelevant psychological factors, by the accidents of interest and attention. Moment by moment the whole fabric of events dissolves in ruins and melts into the past ; and all that survives of the thing done passes into the custody of a shifting, capricious, imperfect, human memory. Nor is the mutilated fragment allowed to rest there, as on a shelf in a museum ; imagination seizes on it ■and builds it with other fragments into . some ideal construc- tion, which may have a plan. and outline laid out, long before this fresh bit of material came to the craftsman's hand to be worked into it, as the drums of fallen columns . are built into tlie rampart of an Acropolis. Add to this the cumulative effects of oral tradition. One ideal edifice falls into ruin ; pieces of it, conglomerates of those ill-assorted and haphazard frag- ments, are caiTied to another site and worked into a structure of, perhaps, a quite different model. Thus fact shifts into ■legend, and legend into myth. The facts icorh -loose ; they are detached from their roots in time and space and shaped into a story. The story is moulded and remoulded by imagination, by passion and prejudice, by religious preconception or aesthetic instinct, by the delight in the marvellous, by the . itch for a moral, by the love of a good story ; and the thing becomes a legend. A few irreducible facts will remain; no more, perhaps, than the names of persons and places — Arthur,^ Caerleon, Camelot;but even those may sit last drop out or be 'turned by a poet into symbols. ' By Arthur,' said Tennyson, . ' I always meant the soul, and by-the Round Table the passions and capacities of man.' The histofy has now all but won over into the mythical. Change the natnes, and every trace of literal fact will have vanished ; the story will have escaped from time into eternity. . When we study this process, we seem to make out two . phases of it,, which, for the criticism of Thucydides, it is necessary to distinguish, The more important and pervasive » Wo aasuir.o that Arthur was historic ; but ho may havo boon Arcturus .for all wo know. K3 132 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS of the two is the moulding of fact into types of nxyth con- tributed by traditional habits of thought. This process of infiguration (if wS may coin the word) may be carried to any degree. Sometimes the facts happen to fit the mould, and requii-e hardly any modification ; mere unconscious selection is enough. In other cases they have to be stretched a little here, and patted down there, and given a twist before they will fit. In extreme instances, where a piece is missing, it is supplied by mythological inference from the interrupted portions which call for completion ; and here we reach the ■ other phase of the process, namely invention. This is no longer a matter of imparting a form to raw material ; it is the creation of fresh material when the supply of fact is not sufiScient to fill the mould. It leads further to the embroidery of fabulous anecdote, which not only has no basis in fact, but is a superfluous addition, related to fact as illustrations in a book are related to the text. The process, in both its phases, can be illustrated from the version preserved by Thucydides ^ of the legend of Earmodius and Aristogeiton, the tyrant-slayers. Harmodius' sister, whom the tyrant insults, makes her first appearance in this account. She is superfluous, since the murderers had ah-eady a sufiicient private motive arising out of the love-quaiTcl. That is not in itself an argument against her historical character, for superfluous people sometimes do exist; but other circumstances make it not improbable that she owes her existence to the mythical typo which normally appears in legend when tyrants have to be slain. The two brothers, or lovers, and the injured sister, or wife — the relationships vary — are the standing dramatis personae on such occasions. Collatinus, Brutus, and Lucretia are r-nother example from legend ; while the purely mythical type which shapes such legends is seen in the Dioscuri and Helen.^ The. suggestion is that Harmodius and Aris- 1 vi. 5iff. ' Even aspirants to tyranny have to bo killed on this pattern. Tlius one Tersion of Alcibiades' death was that tho brothers of a woman -with whom ho was saeading the night set firo to tho house and cut him down as ho leapt out through the flames. Plut. vit. Alcib. fin. MYTIIISTORIA AND THE DRAMA 333 togeitcn were identified ■with the Heavenly Twins. If there is any truth in the story of how Peisistratus was conducted back to Athens by a woman dressed as Athena and accepted by the citizens as the goddess in pei-son.^ it is not surprising that tho next generation of Athenians should have recognized the Dioscuri in Harmodius and his ■ friend. Given that identification, the injured sister is felt to bo a desirable, if not indispensable, accessory; she is filled in by inference, and she becomes a candidate for tho place of ' basket-bearer ' in the Panathenaic procession, at which the murder took place. Thus, the legend of Harmodius illustrates both the phases of the process we described : first, it is moulded on the mythical type of the Heavenly Twins, and then invention supplies the missing third figure.^ Mythical types of this sort can be discovered and classified only after a wide survey of comparative Mythistoria ; for we all take our own habits of thought for granted, and we cannot perceive their bias except by contrast. The- Greek who knew only Greek legend could not possibly disengage the substance from the form ; all he could do was to prune away the fabulous and supernatural overgrowths, and cut down poetry into pixso. It is thus that Thucydides treats myths like the story of Tcreus, Procne, and Philomela ^ ; he rationalizes them, thinking that he has reduced them to history when ho has removed unattested and improbable accretioiis, such as the transformation of Terous into a hoopoe. But history can- not bo made by this process (which is still in use) ; all , that wo get is, not the original facts, but a mutilated legend ; * and this may very well be so mutilated that it is' no longer possible to distinguish tho informing element of fiction, which ■wau discernible till wc eflaced tho clues. The phenomenon that especially concerns us now is some- ' > Herod, i. 60. ' On this subject see MUcke, Vom Euphrat zum Tiber (1S99), who points out other examples of the mythical type. " ii. 29. 134 THUCYDIDES MYTHICUS thing much wider than the mythical infiguration of a single incident here or there, such as the legend of the Tyrant- slayers. It is the moulding of a long series of events into a plan determined by an art form. When -we set the Persians of Aeschylus beside the history of Herodotus, we see at onco that the tragedian in dramatizing the events of Xerxes' inva- sion, some of which he had personally witnessed, has also worked them into a theological scheme, preconceived and contributed by his own mind. Further we remark that Herodotus, although he is operating in a different medium and writing a saga about the glory of Athens, uses the same theological train of thought as a groundwork, and falls in with the dramatic conception of Aeschylus. This is a case of the infiguration of a whole train of events by a form which is mythical, in so far as it involves a theological theory of sinful pride punished by jealous divinity, and is also an art form, by which the action is shaped on dramatic principles of construction, involving such features as climax, reversal, catastrophe. The theory and the form together provide the setting of the whole story — the element which makes it a work of art. This element is so structural that it cannot be removed without the whole fabric falling to pieces, and at the same time so latent and pervasive, as not to be per- ceptible until the entire work is reviewed in its large outline. Even then it can be detected only by a critic who is on his guai"d and has not the same scheme inwrought into the substance of his own mind ; for if he is himself disposed to see the events in conformity with the scherae, then the story will answer his expectation and look to him perfectly natural. When Thucydides speaks of 'the mythical', it seems probable from the context that he is thinking chiefly of inventive ' embellishment '. The accretions of fabulous auec- dote are comparatively easy to detect ; they often bring in the supernatural in the forms of vulgar superstition, and being for this reason improbable, they require better evidence than is forthcoming. Also, poets tend to magnify their theme for purposes of panegyric, flattering to their audience ; MYTHISTGRLA. AND THE DEAMA 135 they •will, for instance, represent Agamemnon's expedition as much larger than it probably was. It is on these grounds that Tbucydid.es objects to the evidence of Ionian Epos and Herodotean story-telling.^ He -warns us against the faults ■which struck his notice ; and he was on his guard against them, even more than against the popular superstition and -dogmatic philosophy of the day, -which he tacitly repudiates. But there was one thing against which he does not w.irn us, precisely because it was the framework of his own thought, not one among the objects of reflection, — a scheme contributed, like the Kantian categories of space and time, by the mind itself to whatever was presented from outside. Thucydides, like Descartes, thought he had stripped himself bare of every preconception ; but, as happened also with Descartes, his work shows that there was after all a residuum wrought into the substance of his mind and ineradicable because unperceived. This residuum was his philosophy of human nature, as it is set forth in the speech of Diodotus, — a theory of the passions and of their working which carried with it a principle of dramatic construction presently to be described. That he was not forearmed against this, he himself shows when, in attacking Herodotus, he accuses him of trivial errors of fact, and does not bring the one sweeping and valid in- dictment which is perfectly relevant to his own point about the embellishment of the Persian War. The di-amatic con- struction of Herodotus' work, which stares a modem reader in the face, apparently escaped the observation of his severest ancient critic. Another proof can be drawn from Thucydides' own account of a series of events which he evidently believed to be historical, the closing incidents, namely, of Pausanias' career.^ He shows us the Spartan king intriguing with the Persian, ' Cf. Plut. malig. Herod, 3 (865 d) al 7^^ Ik/3oXoi m! irapar povaX t^s laropias liiKiara toTs /liSots ^iSovrau ital rats apxaio\oyiaif, In SJ Trpir rois iwalvou^. This refers to digressions (vapevOjJKat), which are regarded as legitimate, -sv-hen. used for the purposes named, i. 128 ff. 1S6 THIJCYDrDES MYTHICU3 and • bent upon the empire of Hellas '. Pausanlas commits certain treacherous acts ; boasts of his power to the Great King ; ' intends, if the king please, to marry his daughter ' ; is so ' uplifted ' by the king's answer that he can no longer live like ordinary men ; ^ behaves like an oriental ; cannot keep silence about his larger designs ; makes himself difficult of access, and displays a harsh temper. Y/'e know all these symptoms well enough, and we foresee the end. Pausanias is recalled, but the evidence against him is insufficient. Ho writes a letter betraying his designs and ending with an order for the execution of the bearer. The messenger, whose sus- picions are aroused, opens the letter and shows it to the authorities at Sparta. The ephors arrange that they shall be concealed behind a partition and overhear a conversation between the king and his treacherous messenger, who contrives to draw from Pausanias a full and damning avowal. The end follows in the Brazen House. This is not the sort of thing that Thucydides objects to as 'mj-thical'; it is not 'fabulous', not the -"embroidery of mere poetical invention ; and so he reports it all in perfect good faith. "What does not strike him, and what does strike ns, is that the story is a drama, framed on familiar lines, and ready to be transferred to the stage without the altera- tion of a detail. The earlier part is a complete presentation of the ' insolent ' tj^e^of character. The climax is reached by a perfect example of ' Kecoil ' {irepmiTna), where the hero gives the fatal letter to the messenger, and thus by his own action precipitates the catastrophe. The last scene is staged by means of a theatrical property now so cheapened by use as to be barely respectable — a screen ! ^ The manner of the hero's death involved sacrilege, and was believed to bring a curse upon his executioners. Could we have better proof ^ Thuc i. ISO -hoXKZ T(5tc- iiaWov ^pro koI ouk«ti ISovaro iv t^ KaStaTUTi Tpoire; 0iOT€veLV. ' It is possible that in this scene -wo can just trace a dramatic motive, ■which is all but rationalized away, — the idea, namely, that Pausanias cannot fall till he has committed himself by his own act, to which act he must be tempted by the traitor. This feature of Aeschylean drama -will be disctissed in the ntxt chapter. MYTHISTORIA AKD THE DRAMA 1£7 that Tbucydides was not on his guard against dramatic construction, and was predisposed to see in the working of events a train of ' causes ' which tragedy had made familiar 1 When we are alive to the dramatic setting, we can infer with some certainty the stages through which the Thucy- didean story of Pausanias has passed. The original stratum of fact must havo been that Pausanias somehow misconducted himself, was recalled, and put to death in circumstances which were capable of being used by superstition and policy against the ephors. These facts worked loose into a legend, shaped by imagination on the model of preconceived morality and views of human nature. The mould is supplied by drama ; and meanwhile fabulous invention is busy in many minds, embroidering the tale with illustrative anecdotes.^ Tbucy- dides brushes away these extravagant and unattested accre- tions, and reduces the legend again to what seemed to him a natural series of events. It is only we who can perceive that what ho has left is the dramatized legend, not the historical facts out of which it was worked up. It is not wildly paradoxical to think that the historian who accepted the legend of Pausanias might frame on the same pattern the legend of Cleon. Not that Thucydides invented any- thing ; all that was needed was to select, half unconsciously, those parts of his life which of themselves composed the pattern.* We must now come to closer quarters with the epithet ' dramatic '. It is worth noting, at the outset, that in the mere matter of external form, the history seems to show the influence of tragedy, — a fact which need not surprise us, if we remember that Thucydides had no model for historical wi-iting. The brief abstract of the annalist was a scaffold, not a building; and Thucydides was an architect, not a carpenter. Chroniclers and story- writers like Herodotus had ' Some of theso anecdotes, preserved by Herodotus, will come up for diBcuasiiOU later. ' Another inatanoe is Thucydides' narrative of Tliemistocles' latter days. This is rationalized Saga-history, influenced by drama. 138 THTJCYDIDES MYTHXCUS ctosen the lax form of epic, congenial to ramblers; but ■whatever the history •was to be, it -was not to bo like Herodotus, and it was to draw no inspiration from tho tradition of Ionian Epos. So Thucydides turned to drama — the only other developed form of literature then existing ■which could furnish a hint for the ne^w type to be created. The severe outline and scrupulous limitations of this form satisfied his instinct for self-suppression. The epic poet stands before his audience and tells his o'wn tale; but the dramatist never appears at all: the 'thing done' (ppajxa) ■works itself out before the spectators' eyes ; the thing said comes straight from the lips of the actors. Best of all, to Thucydides' thinking, if ■we, of after times, could ourselves have watched every battle as it was won and lost, and ourselves have heard every speech of env»y and statesman ; we should then have known all, and much more than all, this history was designed to tell. But as this cannot he, we are to have the next thing to it ; we shall sit as in a theatre, where the historian will erect his mimic stage and hold the mirror up to Nature. Himself will play the part of ' messenger ' and narrate ' what was actually done ' with just so much of vividness as the extent of his own information warrants. For the rest, the actors shall tell their own tale, as near as may be, in the -very words they used, * as I heard them myself, or as others reported them.' Speeches are much more prominent in Thucydides' history than they are in that of Herodotus. The change seems partly due to the later historian's preference for setting forth motives in the form of ' pretexts ', instead of giving his own opinion ; but it is also due to his being an Athenian. Plato similarly chose to cast his speculations in the dramatic form of dialogue, alloY.nng various points of view to be expressed by typical representatives, without committing himself to any of them. Even oratory at Athens was . dramatically conceived ; the speech-writer did not appear as advocate in court ; he ■wrote speeches in character' to be delivered by his clients. It has I often been remarked that the debates in Thucydides resemble! in some points of technique the debates in a Euripidean play./ MTTHISTOEIA AND TIIE DKAMA 139 There is moreover in one respect an intellectual kinship between Thueydides and the dramatist who was contempora- neously moulding the form of tragedy to the strange uses of realism, and v/orking away from Aeschylus as Thueydides had to work away from Herodotus. The two men are of very different temperaments ; but in both we seem to find the same sombre spirit of renunciation, the same conscious resolve nowhere to overstep the actual, but to present the naked thoughts and actions of humanity, just as they saw them. No matter how crude'the light," how harsh the outEne, so that- the thing done and the thing said shall stand out as they were, in isolated sharpness, though Mist is under and mist above, ... And we drift on legends for ever.' These considerations, however, touch only the question of external form : they show why so much that we should state directly is stated indirectly by Thueydides, in speeches. The choice of this form is consistent with a complete absence of plot or of dramatic construction : otherwise Thueydides could not have chosen it at starting ; for at that moment the plot lay in the unknown future.. We mention the point only because evidently it was somewhat easier for an historian ■who consciously borrowed the outward form of tragedy, to take unconsciously the further step, and fall in -with its inward form and principle of design. It is this -which we now wish to define more closely. The type of drama we have detected in the history is not the Euripidean type; it will bo found, on examination, to show an analogy with the older form existing in the tragedies of Aeschylus. The resemblances are reducible to two main points. Tho first is an analogy of technical construction, seen in the use and correlation of different parts- of tho work. The second is a community of psychological conceptions : a mode of presenting character, and also a theory of the passions -which has a place not only in psychology, but in ethics. We shall begin by studying the structure ; but we -may bear in mind ' Eurip. Hippol. 191 ff. Ml-. Gilbert Murray's translation. 140 THUCTDIDES MYTHICUS that this structure is closely . involved with the paychological theory. An art form, such as the Aeschylean drama, shapes itself t5 a sort of crust, over certain beliefs which harden into that outline;' When this hag .happened, the beliefs themselves — the content of the mould — ^.may griidualiy be modified and transmuted in many ways. Finally, they may melt and almost fade away, leaving the type, which is preserved as a traditional form of art. ■ This survival of an element of . technical construction may be illustrated- by the instance of ' reversal' {ireptTTsreta). A ' reversal t)f fortune', is the cardinal point of primitive tragedy r, and it originally means an over- throw, caused by. an external supernatural agency — Fate or an angry god. When the belief in such agencies fades, 'reversa,!' remains as a feature in. drama; but- the change of situation is now caused by the hero's own- act.- The notion of 'recoil' comes in: that is to sayj the fatal action itself produces' results just the. opposite of those intended — a per- fectly natural occurrence. In this way a piece of technique. • outlasts the belief which gave rise to it."' The Aeschylean drama appears to us to have gone through a process of this kind.' The structure, as we find it, seems to impl}'' an original content of beliefs in some respects more primitive than those explicitly held by Aeschylus- himself, but survi-Ting in his mind with sufficient strength to influence, his . work. . Similarly, as we hope to show, in transmission from Aeschylus to Thucydides, the dramatic type has again out- lasted much of the belief which informed it in the Aeschyleaii stage. It is the artistic structure which is permanent'; the content changes- with. the. ad.vance of thought.- Hence, if we point to Aeschylean technique in Thucydides, we are not necessfirily attributing to him the creed of Aeschylus.. We must first attempt' to describe the Btructure of Aeschy- lean tragedy.^ In order to understand, it wo must try. to '■ Tho deseription -which follo-ws.is ba^od on'aa. analysis of tho improsslon made on, tho -vrritor by an Aosohylean tragedy. It. is of courso not sus- • MYTHISTORIA AND THE DEAMA 141 imagine a yet more primitive stage in the development of the drama than any represented in extant Greek literature, a stage which the earliest of Aeschylus' plays has already left some way behind. A glance at the development of modem drama may help us. Certain features which survived in Grfeek tragedy suggest that we should look back to a type somewhat resembling the mediaeval mystery and some of the earliest modem dramas, such &s, .Everyman, which, are like the mystery in being religious performances and in the element of allegorical abstraction. ' Their effect, duo -in part to each of these features, may be described as symbolic. Everyman is a sermon made visible. To watch it is ■ like watching the pastime called ' living chess '> in which the pieces are men and women, bat the man who is dressed like a bishop is. nothing more than a chessman who happens to be automatic. He has not . the episcopal character ; his dress' is a disguise with nothing behind it ;• his words, if ho spoke, would be the speech of a pan-ot. And so it is with Everyman. The persons are not persons at all, but personae, masks, symbols, the vehicles. of abstract ideas. They do not exist, and could not be conceived as existing, in real space and time. They have no human characters, no inward motives, no life of their own, Evoryman, as his name is meant to show, is in fact- not a man, but Man, the universal. .The main development of modern drama shows, in one of 'its aspects,, the process by which this symbolic' method gives way to the realistic. The process consists in the gradual filling in of the human being behind the mask, till the humanity is sufficiently concrete and vital to burst the shell and step forth in solid flesh and blood. The symbol comes to contain d typo of character; the type is particulai-izod into, a unique individual. The creaturo now has: an inde- pendent status- and behaviour of its own. Every gesture and every word must be such as would bo used by an coptiW.0 cf domoustrntion ; tlio only test is tlio reader's own impression. Tlio desaiiption is not exhaustive, but is designed only to bring out a .- neglected aspect. 142 THUCTDIDES MYTIIICUS ordinary human being -vritli the given character in the given situation. Once created, the personality is an original centre ; it cannot be made to do -what we please or to utter our thoughts. In some such terras as these a modern novelist or playwright wiU speak of his characters ; and it is thus that they appear to us. Is ow we can observe a certain intermediate stage in which these two methods, the symbolic and the realistic, ai-e balanced in antagonism, so as to produce a curious effeco of tension and incoherency. A good instance is Marlowe's Fai'Muc. Faustus himself occupies the central plane ; he is a living man, but still imprisoned in a symbolical type. The intrusion of humanity has gone far enough to disturb the abstract effect, and it reacts on some of the persons in the play, who ought to be purely symbolic. Lucifer, it is true, is kept apart and remains non-human ; but Mophis- tophilis oscillates in our imagination between the ideal and reality, with a distressing result. Again, on a lower level than Faustus there is yet another grad0 of persons, in contrast with whom he shows up as heroic and ideal. These are tho vintner, the horse-courser, and other pieces of common clay picked out of a London alley; they belong to a different world, and we feel that they could no more communicate with the tragic characters than men can talk with angels.^ Thus there are in this one play four sets or orders of persons: (1) the purely abstract and symbolic, such as Lucifer, who only appears on an upper stage at certain moments, and takes no part in the action ; (2) tho intermediate, for instance Mcphistophilis, who ought to bo symbolic, but treads tho lower stage, a cowled enigma,^ horrible because at moments he ceases to bo symbolic without becoming human ; (3) the ' "\Vc hoTio it is true that Marlowo did not write tho comic sconoa ; but wo are only concerned with the effect of tlio play as it stands. ' In tho Elizabethan Stage Society's representation Mophistophilis is co-nled and his /oca is never seen. The effect is indescribably horrible. At certain moments in Greek Tragedy the mask must have produced a some- ■what similEJ: effect, though tho familiarity of tho convention would make it much less in degree. The longing to see the actor's face, when his words are enigmatic, is almost enough to drive a modern spectator insane. MYTHISTOBIA AND THE DRAMA 143 Tieroic or tragic: Faustus, who is an ideal half realized, hanging together on its own plane; (4) the real: common mortals who would attract no attention in Fleet Street. The Greek drama, although in the detail of historical development it started at a different point from the modem, and followed another course, seems, nevertheless, to pass through a phase analogous to that which we have just de- ■ scribed. The original substance of the drama was the choral lyric ; the actors (as they afterwards became) began as an excrescence. At a certain stage the actors are assimilated to the chorus and move in the same atmosphere. Thus in the earliest play of Aeschylus, the Suppliants, we find that the chorus of Danaids are actually the heroines of the action, which centres round them, so that they are not merely on the same plane with the actors, but themselves a complex actor, and the effect is simple, coherent, and uniform. In the PrometJteus, again, the chorus belong to the same ideal world as the Titan hero, a world in which abstract symbols like Mastery and Violence can move without showing as unreal against the other persons.' The whole drama is on the symbolic plane, the life in it being due to anthropo- morphic imagination, not to the intrusion of realism. But in the latest plays of Aeschylus, the beginning of a change is clearly marked : the actors are becoming human, while the lyric is rising above them, or else remains sus- pended in a rarer atmosphere from which they are sinking. This is a natural stage in the passage from pure symbolism to realism. The advance shows itself externany in the drifting apart of the lyrical clement from the dialogue, — a separation which, of course, widens in the later tragedians, till the choral ode, though still an indispensable and very beautiful feature, becomes in point of construction little more than an interlude, which relieves the concentrated intensity of the action. This change is commonly tak-en as a pheno- menon which needs no explanation ; but really it is caused » Contrast tho uttor unreality of Iris .