Authors of Greece

T >> T. W. Lumb >> Authors of Greece

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The _Plutus_, written in 388 is a singular work. An honest old man
Chremylus enters with Carion "his most faithful and most thievish
servant". They are holding fast a blind old man, in obedience to an
oracle of Apollo. After a little questioning the stranger admits that
he is Plutus, the god of wealth. Wild with joy they invite him to
their house. He does not like houses, for they have never brought him
to any good.

"If I enter a stingy man's abode, he immediately digs me deep in
the earth and denies he has ever seen me. If I enter a crazy
man's home, given to dicing and fast living, I am soon ejected
naked."

Learning that Chremylus is honest and poor he consents to try once
again.

The rumour gets abroad that Chremylus has suddenly grown rich; his
acquaintance reveal their true characters as they come to question him
about his luck. The goddess Poverty enters, to be cross-examined by
Chremylus who has suggested that Plutus should recover his sight under
the healing care of Asclepius. Before the care is effected, she points
out the dangers of his project. He is well-meaning, but foolish;
Poverty is not Mendicancy, it means a life of thrift, with nothing
left over but with no real want; it is the source of the existence of
all the handicrafts, nor can the slaves be counted on to do the work
if everybody becomes rich, for nobody will sell slaves if he has money
already. Riches on the other hand are the curse of many; wealth rots
men, causing gout, dropsy and bloated insolence; the gods themselves
are poor, otherwise they would not need human sacrifice.

The cure is successful; Plutus recovers his eyes and can see to whom
he gives his blessings; the good and the rascals alike receive their
due reward. The change which wealth produces in men's natures is most
admirably depicted in the Epilogue.

This is an Allegory dramatised with no little skill. The piece is full
of the shrewdest hits at our human failings, aimed, however, with no
ill-nature. Aristophanes' power of characterisation here shows no
falling-off. Fortune's fickleness is proverbial and has received
frequent literary treatment. Men's first prayer is for wealth;
poverty, according to Dr. Johnson, is evidently a great evil because
it needs such a long defence. Yet it is only the well-meaning but
utterly unpractical idealists who desire to make us all prosperous--

"How that may change our nature, that's the question."

Some are not fit for riches, being ignorant of their true function;
self-indulgence and moral rottenness follow wealth; because of the
abuse of the power which wealth brings, we are taught that it is hard
for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.

It is difficult to convey an adequate impression of Aristophanes to
the English reader. Long excerpts are impossible and undesirable.
Comedy is essentially a mirror of contemporary life; it contains all
kinds of references to passing political events and transient forms of
social life; its turns of language are peculiar to its own age. We who
are familiar with Shakespeare know that one of our chief difficulties
in reading him is the constant reference to what was obvious to the
Elizabethan public but is dark to us. Yet the plays of Aristophanes in
an English translation such as that of Frere read far more like modern
work than the comedies of Ben Jonson, for the society in which
Aristophanes moved was far more akin to ours. It was democratic, was
superficially educated, was troubled by socialistic and communistic
unrest exactly as we are. Some of our modern thinkers would be
surprised to find how many of their dreamings were discussed
twenty-three centuries ago by men quite as intelligent and certainly
as honest.

Aristophanes' greatest fault is excessive conservatism. He gives us a
most vivid description of the evils and abuses of his own time, yet
has no remedy except that of putting back the hands of the clock some
fifty years. Marathon, Aeschylus, the nascent democracy were his ideal
and he was evidently put out by the ending of the period of "Periclean
calm." He then has no solution for the problems in front of him. But
it might be asked whether a dramatist's business is not rather to
leave solutions to the thinker, concerning himself only with mirroring
men's natures. With singular courage and at no small personal risk
this man attacked the great ones of his day, scourging their
hypocrisies and exposing the real tendencies of their principles. If
he has opened our eyes to the objections to popular government and
popular poetry and has made us aware of the significance of the
feminist movement, let us be thankful; we shall be more on our guard
and be less easily persuaded that problems are new or that they are
capable of a final solution.

On the other hand, we shall find in him qualities of a most original
type. His spirits are inexhaustible, he laughs heartily and often
without malice at the follies of the mass of men; Cleon and Euripides
were anathema to him, but the rest he treats as Fluellen did Pistol:
"You beggarly knave, God bless you". His lyrics must be classed with
the best in Greek poetry. Like Rabelais this rollicking jolly spirit
disguises his wisdom under the mask of folly, turning aside with some
whimsical twist just when he is beginning to be too serious. He will
repay the most careful reading, for his best things are constantly
turning up when least expected. His political satire ceasing with the
death of Cleon, he turned to the land of pure fancy among the winged
careless things; he then raised the woman's question, started literary
criticism and ended with Allegory. To few has such a noble cycle of
work been vouchsafed; we owe him at least a debt of remembrance, for
he loved us as our brother.

TRANSLATIONS:

Frere (verse). This spirited version of five plays is justly famous.
Various plays have been rendered into verse by Rogers (Bell). The
translation is on the whole rather free. The volumes contain excellent
introductions and notes.

No prose translation of outstanding merit has appeared.

The Greek tragedians have not received their due from translators and
admirers. There is nothing in English drama inspired by Greece to
compare with the French imitations of Seneca, Plautus and Terence.

HERODOTUS

Greek historical literature follows the same course of development as
Greek poetry; it begins in epic form in Ionia and ends in dramatic
type at Athens.

Herodotus, "the father of History", was born at Halicarnassus in Asia
Minor about 484 B.C. He travelled widely over the East, Egypt, North
Africa and Greece. He was acquainted with the Sophoclean circle,
joined the Athenian colony at Thurii in South Italy and died there
before the end of the century. His subject was the defeat of the
Persian attack on Greece and falls into three main divisions. In the
first three books he tells how Persian power was consolidated: in the
next three he shows how it flooded Russia, Thrace and Greece, being
stemmed at Marathon in 490; the last three contain the story of its
final shattering at Salamis and Plataea in 480 and of the Greek recoil
on Asia in 479. It is thus a "triple wave of woes" familiar to Greek
thought. His dialect is Ionic, which he adopted because it was the
language of narrative poetry and prose.

His introduction leads at once into Romance; he intends to preserve
the memory of the wonderful deeds of Greeks and Barbarians, the cause
of their quarrel being the abductions of women, Io, Europe, Medea,
Helen. A more recent aggressor was Croesus, King of Lydia, who
attacked the Greek seaboard. The earlier reigns of Lydian kings are
recounted in a series of striking narratives. Gyges was the owner of
the famous magic ring which made its possessor invisible. His policy
of expansion was continued by his son and grandson. But Croesus, his
great-grandson, was the wealthiest of all, extending his realm from as
far as the Halys, the boundary of Cyrus' Persian Empire. Solon's
famous but fictitious warning to him to "wait till the end comes
before deciding whether he had been happy" left him unmoved. Soon
clouds began to gather. A pathetic misadventure robbed him of his son;
the growing power of Persia alarmed him and he applied to Delphi for
advice. The oracle informed him that if he crossed the Halys he would
ruin a mighty Empire and suggested alliance with the strongest state
in Greece. Finding that Athens was still torn by political struggles
consequent upon the romantic banishments and restorations of
Peisistratus, he joined with Sparta which had just overcome a powerful
rival, Tegea in Arcadia.

Croesus crossed the Halys in 554. After fighting an indecisive battle
he retired to his capital Sardis. Cyrus unexpectedly pursued him. The
Lydian cavalry stampeded, the horses being terrified by the sight and
odour of the Persian camel corps. Croesus shut himself up in Sardis
which he thought impregnable. An excellent story tells how the
Persians scaled the most inaccessible part of the fortress. Croesus
was put on a pyre and there remembered the words of Solon. Cyrus,
dreading a similar revolution of fortune, tried in vain to save him
from the burning faggots; the fire was too fierce for his men to
quench, but Apollo heard Croesus' prayer and sent a rainstorm which
saved him. Being reproached by the fallen monarch who had poured
treasure into his temple, Apollo replied that he had staved off ruin
for three full years, but could not prevail against Fate; besides,
Croesus should have asked whose Empire he was to destroy; at least
Apollo had delivered him from death. The Lydian portion ends with a
graphic description of laws, customs and monuments.

The rise of Persia is next described. Assyria, whose capital was
Nineveh, was destroyed by Cyaxares of Media, whose capital was
Ecbatana. His son Astyages in consequence of a dream married his
daughter Mandane to a Persian named Cambyses. A second dream made him
resolve to destroy her child Cyrus who, like Oedipus, was saved from
exposure by a herdsman. Later, on learning Cyrus' identity, Astyages
punished Harpagus whom he had bidden to remove the child. Harpagus
sowed mutiny in the Median army, giving the victory to the Persians in
558. Cyrus proceeded to attack the Asiatic Greeks, of whom the
Phocaeans left their home to found new states in Corsica and Southern
Gaul; the other cities surrendered. Babylon was soon the only city in
Asia not subject to Persia. Cyrus diverted the course of the Euphrates
and entered the town in 538. In an attack on Tomyris, queen of a
Scythian race, Cyrus was defeated and slain in 529.

His son Cambyses determined to invade Egypt, the eternal rival of the
Mesopotamian kings. Herodotus devotes his second book to a description
of the marvels of Egypt, through which he travelled as far as
Elephantine on the border of Ethiopia. He opens with a plain proof
that Egypt is not the most ancient people, for some children were kept
apart during their first two years, nobody being allowed to speak with
them. They were then heard to say distinctly the word "bekos" which
was Phrygian for "bread". This evidence of Phrygian antiquity
satisfied even the Egyptians.

In this second book there is hardly a single leading feature of
Egyptian civilisation which is not discussed. The Nile is the life of
the land; being anxious to solve the riddle of its annual rise,
Herodotus dismisses as unreasonable the theory that the water is
produced by the melting snow, for the earth becomes hotter as we
proceed further south, and there cannot be snow where there is intense
heat. The sun is deflected from its course in winter, which
derangement causes the river to run shallow in that season. The
religious practice of the land are well described, including the
process of embalming; oracles, animals, medicine, writing, dress are
all treated. He notes that in Egyptian records the sun has twice risen
in the west and twice set in the east.

A long list of dynasties is relieved with many an excellent story,
notably the very famous account of how Rhampsonitis lost his treasures
and failed to find the robber until he offered him a free pardon;
having found him he said the Egyptians excelled all the world in
wisdom, and the robber all the Egyptians. The Pyramids are described;
transmigration is discussed and emphasis is laid upon the growing
popularity of Greek mercenaries. The book closes with the brilliant
reign of Amasis, who made overtures to the Greek oracles, allied
himself with Samos and permitted the foundation of an important Greek
colony at Naucratis.

The third book opens with the invasion of Egypt by Cambyses in 525 on
account of an insult offered him by Amasis. A Greek mercenary named
Phanes gave the Persians information of the one means of attacking
through the desert. After a fierce battle at Pelusium Egypt was
beaten; for years afterwards skulls of both armies lay around, the
Persian heads being easily broken by a pebble, the Egyptian scarcely
breakable by stones. In victory Cambyses outraged Psammenitus, the
defeated King; a fruitless expedition against Ethiopia and the
Ammonians followed. The Egyptians were stirred by the arrival of their
calf-god Apis; Cambyses mockingly wounded him and was punished with
madness, slaying his own kindred and committing deeds of impiety.

At that time Egypt was leagued with the powerful island of Samos,
ruled by Polycrates, a tyrant of marvellous good fortune. Suspecting
some coming disaster to balance it, Amasis urged him to sacrifice his
dearest possession to avert the evil eye. Polycrates threw his ring
into the sea; it was retrieved by a fisherman. On hearing this, Amasis
severed his alliance.

In the absence of Cambyses two Magi brothers stirred up revolt in
Susa, one pretending to be Smerdis, the murdered brother of Cambyses.
That monarch wounded himself in the thigh as he mounted his horse. The
wound festered and caused speedy death. Meanwhile the false Smerdis
held the sovereignty. He was suspected by Otanes, a noble whose
daughter Phaedyme was married to him. At great personal risk she
discovered that the King was without ears, a manifest proof that he
was a Magian. Otane thens joined with six other conspirators to put
the usurper down. Darius, son of Hystaspes, warned them that their
numbers were too large for secrecy, advising immediate action. The two
pretenders had meanwhile persuaded Prexaspes, a confidant of Cambyses,
to assure the Persians that Smerdis really ruled. Prexaspes told the
truth and then threw himself to death from the city walls. This news
forced the conspirators' hands; rushing into the palace, they were
luckily able to slay the usurpers.

The next question was, who should reign? Herodotus turned these
Persians into Greeks, making them discuss the comparative merits of
monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. They decided that their horses
should choose the next king; he whose steed should first neigh should
rule. Darius had a cunning groom named Oebares; that evening he took
the horse and his mare into the market-place; next morning on reaching
the same spot the horse did not fail to seat his master on the throne
in 521. A review of the Persian Empire follows, with a description of
India and Arabia.

Polycrates did not long survive. He was the first Greek to conceive
the idea of a maritime empire. He was foully murdered by the Persian
Oroetes, who decoyed him to the mainland by an offer of treasure and
then crucified him. In the retinue of Polycrates was a physician,
Democedes of Croton, who was captured by Oroetes. His fame spread to
Susa at a time when no court doctor could treat Darius' sprained foot.
Democedes was sent for and effected the cure; later he healed the
Queen Atossa of a boil. Instructed by him she advised Darius to send a
commission of fifteen Persians to spy out the Greek mainland under
Democedes' guidance. After an exciting series of adventures the
physician succeeded in returning to his native city. But the idea of
an invasion of Greece had settled on Darius' mind. First, however, he
took Samos, giving it to Syloson, Polycrates' brother who years before
in Egypt had made him a present of a scarlet cloak while he was a mere
guardsman. Darius consolidated his power in Asia by the capture of the
revolted province of Babylon through the self-sacrifice of Zopyrus,
son of one of the seven conspirators. The vivid story of his devotion
is one of the very greatest things in Herodotus.

Persia being thus mistress of all Asia, of Samos and the seaboard,
began to dream of subduing Greece itself. But first Darius determined
to conquer his non-Greek neighbours. The fourth book describes the
attack which Darius himself led against the Scythians in revenge for
the twenty-eight years' slavery they inflicted on the Medes. A
description of Scythia is relieved by an account of the
circumnavigation of Africa by the Phoenicians and the voyage of Scylax
down the Indus and along the coast of Africa to Egypt.

The war on the Scyths was dramatic and exciting, both sides acting in
the spirit of chivalry. Crossing the Bosporus, Darius advanced through
Thrace to the Danube which he spanned with a bridge. The Scyths
adopted the favourite Russian plan of retreating into the interior,
destroying the crops and hovering round the foe; they further led the
Persians into the territories of their own enemies. This process at
last wearied Darius; he sent a herald to challenge them to a straight
contest or to become his vassals. The reply came that if Darius wished
a conflict he had better outrage their ancestral tombs; as for
slavery, they acknowledged only Zeus as their master. But the threat
of slavery did its work. A detachment was sent to the Danube to induce
the Ionian Greeks to strike for freedom by breaking down the bridge
they were guarding, thus cutting off Darius' retreat. To the King
himself a Scythian herald brought a present of a bird, a mouse, a frog
and five arrows, implying that unless his army became one of the
creatures it would perish by the arrows. The Scyths adopted guerilla
tactics, leaving the Persians no rest by night and offering no battle
by day. At last Darius began his retreat. One division of the Scythian
horsemen reached the bridge before their foes, again asking the
Ionians to destroy it. The Greeks pretended to consent, breaking down
the Scythian end of it. Darius at last came to the place; to his
dismay he found the bridge demolished. He bade an Egyptian Stentor
summon Histiaeus, the Greek commandant, who brought up the fleet and
saved the Persian host which retired into Asia.

In 509 a second expedition was dispatched against Barca, a colony of
Cyrene. The history of the latter is graphically described, the first
king being Battus, the Stammerer, who founded it in obedience to the
directions of Apollo. Cyrene was brought under Cambyses' sway by
Arcesilaus who had been banished. He misinterpreted an oracle and
cruelly killed his enemies in Barca. When he was assassinated in that
town his mother Pheretima fled from the metropolis Cyrene to Aryandes,
the Persian governor in Egypt. Backed by armed force she besieged
Barca which resisted bravely for nine months; at the end of that term
an agreement was made that Barca should pay tribute and remain
unassailed as long as the ground remained firm on which the treaty was
made. But the Persians had undermined the spot, covering planks of
wood with a loose layer of earth. Breaking down the planks they rushed
in and took the town, Pheretima exacting a horrible vengeance. Yet she
herself died soon after, eaten of worms. "Thus," remarks the
historian, "do men, by too severe vengeances, draw upon their own
heads the divine wrath."

The fifth book begins the concentration on purely Greek history.
Darius had left Megabazus in command in Europe, retiring himself to
Sardis. In that city he was much struck by the appearance of a
Paeonian woman and ordered Megabazus to invade the country. He subdued
it and Macedonia in 506-4, but in the process some of his commanders
were punished for an insult to Macedonian women, revenge being taken
by Alexander, son of King Amyntas; a bride shut the lips of a party
sent to discover their fate. In Thrace, Megabazus began to suspect
Histiaeus, the Ionian who had saved Darius and in return had been
given a strong town, Myrcinus on the River Strymon. The King by a
trick drew Histiaeus to Sardis and took him to the Capital, leaving
his brother Artaphernes as governor in Sardis. But Histiaeus had been
succeeded in Miletus by his nephew Aristagoras; to him in 502 came
certain nobles from Naxos, one of the Cyclades isles, begging
restoration from banishment. He decided to apply to Artaphernes for
Persian help; this the viceroy willingly gave as it would further the
Persian progress to the objective, the Greek mainland, across the
Aegean in a direct line. The Persian admiral Megabates soon quarrelled
with Aristagoras about the command and informed the Naxians of the
coming attack. The expedition thus failed. Aristagoras, afraid to face
Artaphemes whose treasure he had wasted, decided on raising a revolt
of the whole of Ionia; at that very moment a slave came to him from
his uncle in Susa with a message tattooed on his head, bidding him
rebel.

Aristagoras first applied to Sparta for aid. When arguments failed, he
tried to bribe the king Cleomenes. In the room was the King's little
daughter Gorgo. Hearing Aristagoras gradually raise his offer from ten
to fifty talents, the child said, "Father, depart, or the stranger
will corrupt thee". Aristagoras received a better welcome at Athens.
That city in 510 had expelled Hippias, the tyrant son of Peisistratus,
who appealed to Artaphernes for aid. Hearing this, the Athenians sent
an embassy asking the satrap not to assist the exile, but the answer
was that if they wished to survive, they must receive their ruler
back. Aristagoras therefore found the Athenians in a fit frame of mind
to listen. They lent him a fleet of twenty sail and marched with him
to Sardis which they captured and burned in 501. The revolt speedily
spread over all the Asiatic sea-coast. On hearing of the Athenians for
the first time, Darius directed a slave to say to him thrice a day,
"Sire, remember the Athenians". He summoned Histiaeus and accused him
of complicity in the revolt, but Histiaeus assured him of his loyalty
and obtained permission to go to the coast. Meanwhile the Persians
took strong action against the rebels, subduing many towns and
districts. The book ends with the flight of Aristagoras to Myrcinus
and his death in battle against the Thracians in 496.

The next book opens with the famous accusation of Histiaeus by
Artaphernes: "Thou hast stitched this boot and Aristagoras hath put it
on." Histiaeus in fear fled to his own city Miletus; being disowned
there, he for a time maintained a life of privateering, but was
eventually captured and crucified by Artaphernes. The Ionian revolt
had been narrowed down to Miletus and one or two less important towns.
The Greeks assembled a fleet, but a spirit of insubordination
manifesting itself they were defeated at sea in the battle of Lade in
495. Next year Miletus fell but was treated with mercy. At Athens the
news caused the greatest consternation; a dramatic poet named
Phrynichus ventured to stage the disaster; the people wept and fined
him a thousand talents, forbidding any similar presentation in future.
Stamping out the last embers of revolt in Asia the Persians coasted
along Thrace; before their advance the great Athenian Miltiades was
compelled to fly from the Dardanelles to his native city. In 492
Mardonius was appointed viceroy of Asia Minor. He reorganised the
provincial system and then attempted to double the perilous promontory
of Athos, but only a remnant of his forces returned to Asia.

Next year Darius sent to all the Greek cities demanding earth and
water, the tokens of submission. The islanders obeyed including
Aegina, the deadly foe of Athens. A protest made by the latter led to
a war between the two states in which Athens was worsted. Sparta
itself had just been torn by an internal dissension between two
claimants of the throne, one of whom named Demaratus had been ejected
and later fled to the Persian court. The great expedition of 490
sailed straight across the Aegean, commanded by Datis and Artaphernes.
Their primary objective was Eretria in Euboea, a city which had
assisted the Ionians in their revolt. The town was speedily betrayed,
the inhabitants being carried aboard the Persian fleet. Guided by
Hippias the armament landed at the bay of Marathon, twenty-five miles
from Athens. A vain appeal was sent to Sparta for succours; Athens,
supported by the little Boeotian city of Plataea, was left to cope
with the might of Persia.

It was fortunate that the Athenians could command the services of
Miltiades who had already had some experience of the Persian methods
of attack. The details of the great battle that followed depend upon
the sole authority of Herodotus among the Greek writers. Many
difficulties are caused by his narrative, but it seems certain that
Miltiades was in command on the day on which the battle was actually
fought. He apparently clung to the hills overlooking the plain and bay
of Marathon until the Persian cavalry were unable to act. Seizing the
opportunity, he led his men down swiftly to the combat; his centre
which had been purposely weakened was thrust back but the two wings
speedily proved victorious, then converged to assist the centre,
finally driving the foe to the sea where a desperate conflict took
place. The Persians succeeded in embarking and promptly sailed round
the coast to Athens, but seeing the victors in arms before the town
they sailed back to Asia. The Spartan reinforcements which arrived too
late for the battle viewed the Persian dead and returned after
praising the Athenians.

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