the greek tradition

7/30/2019 The Greek Tradition

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Presented to theLIBRARY of the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTOby

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THE GREEK TRADITION


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The Plays of EuripidesTranslated into English Rhyming Verse, with Commentaries

and Explanatory NotesBy gilbert MURRAY, LL.D., D.Litt.

Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford.Crown ^ve. Cloth, zs. net each. Paper, \s. net each ;

or in two vols. \s. net each.HIPPOLYTUSBACCHAETHE ELECTRATHE TROJAN WOMENMEDEAIPHIGENIA IN TAURISRHESUSALCESTIS

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ANDROMACHE : An Original Play in Three ActsCrown %vo. Cloth, zs. net. Paper, \s. net

[Third Impression

CARLYON SAHIB : An Original Play in Three ActsRevised Edition. Crown %vo. Cloth, zs. net. Paper, \s. net


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THE GREEK TRADITIONESSAYS IN THE RECONSTRUCTIONOF ANCIENT THOUGHT

BYJ. A. K. THOMSON, M.A.

Author of "Studies in the Odyssey"

WITH A PREFACE BY PROF. GILBERT MURRAY

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET W.C.NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.


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Let all men judge, who is it can denyThat the rich crown of old HumanityIs still your birthright? and was n^er let downFrotn heaven for rule of beasts' lives, but your own ?Chapman.


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INTRODUCTIONWhen Mr, Thomson's fine Studies in the Odysseyappeared, I happened to notice one solemn reviewerwho, after four lines of earnest misdescription, con-cluded by expressing his grief that any University hadpublished such a book. It should have been strangledunborn and its author effectually silenced. Meditatingon the point of view disclosed, I remembered thatexactly the same thing had been said about one of myown early books. And, on further reflection, I recalledat least three other scholars, now occupying UniversityChairs or similar positions, whose early writings werewelcomed in the same way.

There is nothing odd in this. It is only one morereminder to us old and established scholars to keep ourminds as alert as we can, and not grow stiff and deaf inour favourite orthodoxies. But the incident made metry to think why I had derived so much pleasure andinstruction from a book which other students appearedwhole-heartedly to despise.

I think the reason probably lies in a certain diver-gence of view about the proper aims of scholarship.When a scholar prepares to comment upon an ancientpoemsay an Ode of Pindar he may, for instance,


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viii INTRODUCTIONfind out from the lexica the received translations of allthe words, analyse the syntax, identify the dialecticalforms, tabulate the comments of the scholia and make ascheme of the metre ; he may, with luck, collect definiteevidence of the date at which the Ode was performed.So far he will be on what is called ' safe ground,' It isnot in the least safe really ; for the lexicon interpreta-tion will probably be inadequate, the syntax of a par-ticular passage may have some subtlety of its ownwhich escapes the broad rule, the scholia will beconfused or, more important still, will not havesufficient command of exegetical language to saywhat they mean, and so on. But it is safe in thesense that, if he is challenged, he can give "chapterand verse" for all his statements. And of course hewill have done valuable work.Yet he will not yet have asked himself the twoquestions that matter most: What does this poemmean? and What is there fine about it? Still lesswill he have asked a third question : How did it cometo be what it is ?Now these questions are rather like the great prob-lems of philosophy. Philosophers tell us that, thoughwe may never raise those problems or even know oftheir existence, we cannot help consciously or un-consciously answering them. I believe there are scholarswho, by great self-restraint, inhibit their natural curi-osity and try their best to avoid asking any questionwhose answer does not admit of what they would callproof. But they do not really succeed. All thathappens is that since these questions cannot be' counted ' in examinations and since they demandfaculties which the ordinary routine of a scholar's or


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INTRODUCTION ixteacher's life does not specially cultivate, they answerthem carelessly or irritably. They treat them as triflesand interruptions. And when they find a scholar, likeMr. Thomson, who is almost entirely occupied withsuch subjects, they are bewildered. They expect himto be answering their questions, whereas he is reallyanswering his own. And they read, skipping andskipping and wondering when the point is coming,and in the end do not see what it was all about ; theyonly know that they violently disagree with, say, afootnote on p. looo.Now of late there has been an interesting change ofemphasis in the study of Greek, a change, we may say,from morphology towards semantics : from the study offorms towards the study of meanings. Of course neitherside can be neglected with impunity. But from thesemantic point of view the central fact to grasp is thatto understand Greek literature you must be able tounderstand literature, and that you cannot understandliterature without using your imagination. Yourimagination is, of course, faulty and liable to mislead^just like your other faculties. You can never arriveat certain and complete knowledge of what Aeschylushad in his mind when he composed a particular passage.But, unless you prefer to give up trying to understandanything at all, the only help is to train your imagina-tion, widen its range and improve its sensitiveness, andby increased knowledge make it a better instrumentfor approaching the truth.Of course a weak or lazy or irresponsible imagination

is no use at all. Indeed the quality on whose usefulnessI am insisting might perhaps be called power of analysisrather than merely imagination. It is the power and


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X INTRODUCTIONthe practice of thinking out and realizing as much aspossible the facts with which one deals, never usingthem merely like counters or algebraical formulae, noragain translating them carelessly into the first " modernequivalent" that comes to hand. I have often marvelledat the misunderstandings of Athenian history whichcome from treating Cleon straight off as a modernRadical and Aristophanes as a Tory. They illustratethe value of Moritz Haupt's oracular saying: "Nevertranslate ; translation is the death of understanding."Of course you must translate some time, but the greatthing is not to translate too soonto think in Greekterms las long as you can, and use, in your effort atunderstanding, Greek ideas and ways of thought. If wewant to understand Cleon, let us start with " the mostviolent of the citizens" and proceed to collect the rest ofthe evidence about him. If we want to understand" Komodia " or to grasp Heracles as a " komic " hero, letus start by grasping the root idea of the ancient" Komos." Then the way will become clearso clearthat we shall probably forget how much we owe toMr. Thomson for pointing it out. It will never beclear if we start from Shakespeare and Meredith'sEssay on Comedy.

If a scholar attempts to understand his subject withthis degree of thoroughness ; if he tries really to feelthe meaning and the connotations of every importantword, if he faces each familiar thought or practice untilit seems strange and then tries to trace the path bywhich such strange things became natural and in-evitable ; then, if he has the requisite equipment oflearning and imagination and sensitiveness, he issure to produce work of real beauty and value, and


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INTRODUCTION xiequally sure to leave much of his work uncertain andinconclusive and his full purpose unachieved. So thatsome readers will certainly delight in him, while someno doubt will continue simply to wonder why suchbooks should be written and printed.

GILBERT MURRAY.


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CONTENTSINTRODUCTIONON AN OLD MAPTHUCYDIDESGREEK COUNTRY LIFEMOTHER AND DAUGHTERALCESTIS AND HER HEROA NOTE ON GREEK SIMPLICITYLUCRETIUSTHE SPRINGS OF POETRYSOME THOUGHTS ON TRANSLATIONA NOTE ON AUTHORITIESINDEX

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ON AN OLD MAPI HAVE been looking at an Orbis Terrarum ad MentemHerodoti or Map of the Earth according to Herodotus.It is roughly circular in shape, with some faint resem-blance to a human skull facing west. Deep into it,almost through it, penetrates a great breach of watersin a diminishing series of enormous lakes, the Mediter-ranean with the Aegean, the Black Sea, and the PalusMaeotis or Sea of Azov. East of the Black Sea isshown the landlocked Caspian ; it looks about thesize of the Sea of Azov. The Mediterranean countriesare just recognizable. But Asia Minor is grotesquelyout of proportion. It is almost fan-shaped, with theAegean coast representing the outspread edge of the fan.The Nile forms two sides of a square, and risesapparently somewhere about Lake Chad. The Danuberises apparently in the Pyrenees. The outer rimsof the Orbis fade away vaguely into uncharted seasand unexplored wildernesses tenanted in the northby ' Hyperboreans ' and ' Arimaspeans ', in the west by' Celts ', in the south by ' Ethiopians ' and again by' Long-lived Ethiopians '. The east is quite franklyDeserta Incognita, the Unknown. The whole looksrather like a sketch of the Mediterranean World madeby a child from memory upon a round piece ofpaper.

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2 THE GREEK TRADITIONYet what a wonderful thing is the mere possibility

of such a map ! Herodotus wrote in an age whenscience had just come into existence, and exactscientific instruments did not exist at all. He hadbeen a great traveller, a great hearer of travellers'tales. He had also, to guide him, the maps of earliergeographers, Periodoi Ges they were called, ' TheWay round the World '. But the maps excite hisridicule ; ' I laugh when I see them ', he says. Con-ceive the difficulty in those days of forming an adequatenotion of the shapes of foreign countries or even ofyour own country. Suppose you had never seen amap except of the kind that made even Herodotuslaugh, and then imagine the sketch you would makeof the British Isles from mere hearsay and the witnessof your own eyes. Herodotus had to do somethinglike that. He had to travel without a theodolite,without a telescope, without a compass. He had tocarry distances and natural features in his head.When he went to sea he must enter a little woodencraft, which was helpless in a current, helpless whenthe stars were hidden of nights, helpless in a highwind, helpless (save for the oars) in no wind at all.He had to piece out his own observations with theconfused and sometimes lying stories of Greek sailorsand half-breed dragomans. Yet out of his bookmodern geographers can construct a quite plausiblemap of Southern Europe. It is really very wonderful.To the average Greek of Herodotus' time and even

later such a map was an almost incredible curiosity.Only a subtle Ionian would possess such a thing.When Aristagoras the tyrant of Miletus came to Spartato ask for help against the Persian, he brought a map


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ON AN OLD MAP 3with him, *a bronze tablet on which was cut theCircle of all the Lands, with every sea, and all therivers '. He explained it all to the Spartan kingCleomenes. " Here are the lonians, and next themthe Lydians, who live in a good land and have storeof silver. . . . Here are the Phrygians, the easterlyneighbours of the Lydians, with more sheep and finerharvests than any other people I know. Next to thePhrygians come the Cappadocians, whom we call theSyrians. TJieir neighbours are the Cilicians, whosecountry stretches down to the sea here, in which liesthe island of Cyprus there. . . ." So Aristagorasproceeded, says Herodotus, pointing to the places ashe mentioned them. The Spartan was impressed butpuzzled. Aristagoras tried an appeal to his cupidity.He told of Susa the capital of the Great King, wherethe royal treasures were stored. " Take that city,and you rival Zeus in wealth ! " And the ' barbarians 'are really great cowards, " The way they fight is likethisbows and arrows and a little spear ! They gointo battle in trousers and mitres ! So easy are theyto overcome ! " Cleomenes, however, wanted a littletime to think ; he was a Spartan. He would give hisanswer at the end of two days. His first question,when they met again, showed that he had been think-ing hard. He asked how many days' journey it wasfrom the coast of Ionia to Susa. "Three months"was the incautious answer. " Milesian stranger, getyou gone from Sparta before sunset ! A hard requestis this of yours to Lacedaemonians, expecting themto perform a three months' journey from the sea !Cleomenes had thought it might take as many days.Everything had looked so little on the map.


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4 THE GREEK TRADITIONCleomenes to be sure was a Spartan, and lived two

generations before Herodotus. But one suspects thatthe geography of the average country-bred Athenianin the great age of Pericles was quite as hazy as that ofCleomenes, an able man, who had led armies up anddown Greece and knew at least the military value oftopography. There is a laughable little scene in theClouds of Aristophanes which shows us how an old-fashioned Athenian regarded a map. Strepsiades isadmiring the wonders of Socrates' academy for youngphilosophers. A disciple points out a Periodos Ges,like that exhibited by Aristagoras but doubtless greatlyimproved, Strepsiades is shown Athens" I don'tbelieve you ", he interrupts, " I don't see the jury-courtssitting ",Attica, the interminable island of Euboea." Where is Sparta ? " he asks eagerly. The discipleindicates it. " So near ! You should apply your wholemind to the problem of removing it quite a longdistance away from us." " But that is impossible."" Very well, you'll regret it, that's all." Strepsiadesis a character in a play, and a buffoon at that ; but heis typical. He is the ' ironical ' man who is not such afool as he looks. He reverses in his own favour theepigram, so full of human wisdom in its apparentsimplicity. The Milesians are not stupid, but they behaveas if they were. I gather from this scene that mapswere moderately familiar to Aristophanes' audiences,but that old people were puzzled to death by them.As for making a map, only a Wise Man, a Sophist,could do that

However disposed Herodotus was to laugh at themaps of the lonians, he certainly made use of them.As a matter of fact no one sits down to make an


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ox AN OLD MAP 5original map. It would be a foolish waste of time,even if one had the knowledge to do it. At best thecartographer makes detailed improvements in theexisting maps. The most modern and scientific issimply the Tablet of Aristagoras improved out of allrecognition. We know that considerable portions ofthe History of Herodotus are based upon the Logos ofhis great predecessor, Hecataeus of Miletus, and wehave good reason for thinking that this Logos was ineffect ' what Hecataeus said ' about the map of Anaxi-mander. Anaximander was a fellow-citizen, a greatgenius with a wonderful gift of scientific imagination.To fix his conception of the universe in its superficialappearance, he constructed a map, the first of whichwe hear. What it was like we can only guess. But acareful reading of Herodotus has made it possible todetect what look like certain guiding principles in thesefirst rudimentary Periodoi. Anaximander availedhimself of two long straight lines, one natural and theother artificial, which served in their way for linesof longitude and latitude. The natural line wasformed by the courses of the Danube and the Nile,which were supposed to flow from north to south andsouth to north respectively, and so to make onestraight line interrupted by the Levant and theAegean. The artificial line was the great Royal Roadof the Persian Empire between Sardis and Susa.Every part of the map was made symmetrical withsome other part, and the whole was surrounded bythe River Ocean, drawn, Herodotus says, 'as if with apair of compasses'.But was Anaximander's really the first map? The

first scientific map it no doubt was, making ' Asia ', that


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6 THE GREEK TRADITIONis practically what we call Asia Minor, 'just equal toEurope' according to a definite scientific hypothesis.But there may quite probably have been before Anaxi-mander an ancient traditional Periplus or Mariners'Guide roughly indicating the outlines of the seas knownto Greek sailors, and marking their dangers and theplaces near the coast where fresh water was procurable.M. Victor Berard in his book on the Phoenicians andthe Odyssey has tried to shew that the wanderings ofOdysseus are, as it were, an imaginative rendering ofsuch a Periplus. It is not in itself an impossible theory ;there is in fact a great deal to be said in its favour.But when M. Berard thinks of the Phoenicians as theoriginal authors of his traditional Periplus, which theGreeks borrowed and translated, and so handed downto the long and varied line of their successors in thecommand of the seas, until it has become embodied atlast in the Mediterranean Pilot issued by the BritishAdmiraltywhen Berard says this, certain old familiardoubts begin to assail us. Those Phoenicians ! Howoften we have followed their stern-lights into impossibleshoals of speculation! Indeed, since Berard wrote hisbook not so many years ago, discoveries have beenmade which have quite dissolved the mirage of a greatPhoenician empire of the seas. There was such anempire in prehistoric times. But it did not belong toPalestine ; it belonged to Crete. It has been thoughtthat the rapid expansion of the Phoenician sea-powerabout looo B.C. was due to an infusion of Cretan in-fluences, and that the Philistines, who may have broughtthese influences, came, if not from Crete, at any ratefrom a land with the Old Cretan or, as scholars say,' Minoan ' civilization. On this view, which is now


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ON AN OLD MAP 7perhaps generally accepted, the Periplus which thePhoenicians in Berard's opinion possessed may wellhave been borrowed from Crete. But we need notreally trouble about that. What we are concerned withis the Ionian Periplus, which demonstrably did exist.We may dismiss the theory that it was based upon aPhoenician predecessor. But was it not perhaps basedupon a Cretan one?We could better estimate the probability of this, ifwe knew for certain who the lonians were. One thingis certain : whatever their racial affinities, the firstsettlers in Ionia were imbued with the ' Minoanculture. And since they settled in the heart of the

' Cretan sea-empire of the Aegean, we may reasonablyinfer that they inherited, along with the ' Minoancivilization in general, something of the sea-lore (notof course necessarily incorporated in any actual in-scribed Periplus) which enabled the Cretan ships tovoyage so boldly and so far.The point is worth considering. Herodotus tells us

that the navy of Minos, the typical ruler of ' MinoanCrete, was manned from the pre-Greek population of theAegean islands. That population was never extermi-nated, it survived in the Carians of historical times.Now it was exactly among these Carians that thelonians settled. That there was a large Carian element(Carians with some tincture of the ' Minoan ' culture) inthe lonians of history is regarded as certain. Does itnot seem on the whole a very probable thing that thetraditional lore of that old seafaring population waspreserved a long time after the fall of the Cretanpower? This hypothesis at least helps to explain thereally startling phenomenon of the Greek Colonization.


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8 THE GREEK TRADITIONThe true character of that very wonderful movement isobscured for us by a cloud of legends ; while the fewsolid facts which do emerge have passed through thesimplifying and dramatizing processes of the popularimagination. Even the picture suggested by modernhistoriansGreek navigators sailing along an unknowncoast on the look out for a likely site for someprosperous new cityis really too Utopian. No ; thecolonists went where trade was doing. If you consulta map you will see that the great Greek colonies wereplanted as a rule at the ends of immemorial trade-routes. Marseille is at the bottom of the Rhone valley.Gyrene was the terminus of the caravan route from theOasis of Siwah. Sinope was the end of a commercialroad from Boghaz-Keui, the ancient capital of theHittites. These great trading stations were not dis-covered by the Greeks. They had been exploited longbefore. There is accumulating evidence that ' Minoangoods travelled over a region nearly coextensive withthe Greek colonial empire. If you read with some careHerodotus' account of the ' founding ' of Gyrene, youwill easily see that the advice to found it was basedupon knowledge which could never have been snatchedup by a storm-stressed merchantman. The advicecame from Delphi. Now, there are two things toremark about that. The first is that in ancient timesthe priests are the great preservers of traditional lore.The second is that the Delphian Oracle in the prevalenttradition was instituted by Cretans. There can be verylittle doubt that the Old Cretans knew the Cyrenaica,just as they knew much remoter lands like South Italyand Sicily and Spain, Even Marseille (Massalia) andAleria, the Greek colony in Corsica, may be Cretan names.


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ON AN OLD MAP 9May we therefore assume that the Greek colonial

empirethe term is used colloquiallywas an attemptto reconstitute the great colonial or trading system ofOld Crete ruined by the irruption of the Hellenes ?There is this to be said. The Greeks themselves wereaware that King Minos was the founder of the firstThalassocracy or Sea-Control. Thucydides implies thatthe Athenian naval power maintained the place onceheld by the ships of Crete. An ancient document hasbeen extracted from Diodorus and Eusebius which givesa list of the ' Thalassocrats ' from the Fall of Troy tothe founding of the Athenian League. Such a listclearly assumes that the command of the sea was not athing of ' to-day or yesterday '. Ultimately, as Thucy-dides understood, the Thalassocracy went back toMinos. Consider the interest of this for the student ofGreek literature. The ancient epic poetry of Greece isfull of a marvellous, fantastic geography. Odysseussails to a land where men live on " a flowery food " thatsteeps their minds in a strange forgetful ness, to a seawhere the rocks float and clash, to a land where nightnever falls. Jason voyages to the Land of the GoldenFleece, Is it all fable? Scholars used to say that thelocalization of the Land of the Golden Fleece inColchis at the eastern corner of the Black Sea mustbe later than the voyages of the Milesians along thenorthern coast of Anatolia. This assumes that theGreeks had never even heard of Colchis before Ionianships went there. I believe they had heard of it.There was a primitive trade-route between the Caspianand the Black Sea through a broad deep valley in theCaucasus. By that channel flows to-day the tradebetween Baku and Batum. Homer knew of ' far-off


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lo THE GREEK TRADITIONAlybe, where silver is born ', somewhere perhaps in theneighbourhood of Erzrum. ' Minoan ' ships may havegone for silver to the mouth of the Phasis before Ioniawas colonized at all.The Argonauts also visited Cyrene. Remember that

tradition persistently calls them ' Minyans ', that is,some scholars would say, ' Minoans '. They had at anyrate the 'Minoan' civilization. Why must we assumethat the visit to Cyrene is an episode added after the'foundation' of the Greek town by the Theraeans?That is the ' safe ' theory. But what is the use of asafe theory if it is incredible ? Again, Jason and hismen sail up the Danube and down the ' Eridanus '.Well, the cautious scholar insists, that at least neverhappened ! It never happened, certainly. But if' Minoan ' merchants heard vague rumours that it wasactually possible to ship goods up the Danube anddown the Rhine or the Rhone ; if goods did as amatter of fact come to them in that way ; would notthis piece of real experience help to project the legend.?How did Homer know that there was a land of the mid-night sun, and a northern land of Cimmerian darkness ?As it falls out, we are able to test the validity of one

of these stories, the strangest, the most incredibleseeming of them all. It concerns the Hyperboreans.They come very early into Greek literature. ' Hesiodhas spoken about them, and Homer also in the Epigoni,if Homer is the real author of the Epigoni! But it isthe people of Delos, Herodotus proceeds, who havemost to tell us about the Hyperboreans, and what theysay is this. Certain offerings wrapped inwheaten strawwere carried from the land of the Hyperboreans intoScythia. The Scythians passed them on to their next


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ON AN OLD MAP iineighbours ; and so from tribe to tribe the offeringswere borne right down to the head of the Adriatic, andthence south-east to Dodona. From Dodona the sacredmessengers struck right across Greece, emerging on theMaHan Gulf in Locris. From Locris they crossed toEuboea, where city received them from city until theycame to Carystus at the southern extremity of theisland. The Carystians convoyed them to the island ofTenos, and the Tenians to Delos. Pausanias, wholived in the time of the Antonines but was neverthelessable to secure a great harvest of extremely ancienttemple-legends, gives an entirely different route. Inhis account the sacred things come by way of theArimaspeans and the Issedones to Sinope, on thesouthern shore of the Black Sea, and from Sinopearrive at last at Prasiae in Attica. If the accounts ofHerodotus and Pausanias are collated, it will be seenthat the Hyperboreans are most naturally placed some-where in Central Asia. One very learned ethnologistactually thinks of the Chinese. The Greeks themselveshad nothing but fables to tell of them. They were anidyllic people, crimeless vegetarians, living somewhere' beyond the north wind ' or, as some conjectured, inthe extreme west. ' Neither on shipboard nor yet afoot ',says Pindar, ' canst thou find to the Assembly of theHyperboreans the wondrous way.'

After this it is certainly surprising to discover thatthe Hyperboreans were a real people. The name wasderived by the Greeks themselves from Jiyper andBoreas, and understood to mean the dwellers ' beyondthe north wind '. It is really a North-Greek word andsignifies ' carriers ' or ' carriers beyond ' or ' across '.Strictly speaking, it is inaccurately applied to the people


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12 THE GREEK TRADITIONwho first started those ' offerings wrapped in wheatenstraw ' upon their wondrous way ; it properly belongsto the sacrosanct envoys who bore them from place toplace. The Greeks in historical times did not knowthe true name of the people, nor where they dwelt, noranything about them except this, that they got theirofferings every year. The Greek imagination wasnaturally touched and wove a cocoon of legends aboutthe one little fact it possessed. Herodotus mentionstwo Hyperborean maidens ' Hyperoche ' and ' Laodice',who were buried in or near ' the precinct of Artemisat Delos, and another, earlier pair, ' Arge ' and ' Opis ',who were buried ' behind the Artemisium'. Excavationhas brought to light in Delos traces of an early' Minoan ' settlement ; a wonderful Terrace of Lions,for example, making one think of the primitive ' LionGoddess ' of the Aegean lands. It may very well bethat ' Artemis ' of Delos is but the old goddess v/ith aGreek name, and that in 'Minoan' times the offeringsof the Hyperboreans were really sent to her rather thanto Apollo, who came more and more to usurp herancient prerogatives. At any rate the holy things weresent, and from a very remote period. The traditionsprove nothing else, but they prove that. They musthave been sent by somebody.

These are vague and distant memories. More clearand traceable is the effect upon geographical knowledgeof the great colonization era. At first it is best seen inpoetry, for as yet the non-literary records hardly count,and there was no prose literature at all. The coming ofthe new knowledge is excellently illustrated in the epicof Heracles. The Heracleia, as it was called, was atraditional poem. That is to say, the original Heracleia,


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ON AN OLD MAP 13which seems to have been put together in the island ofRhodes, was taken up, developed, extended, writtenover again, by a series of poets. We hear of threebefore Herodotus' time : Peisinous of Rhodes, Pisanderof Rhodes, Panyassis of Halicarnassus, who was theuncle of Herodotus. That historian evidently knowshis Heracleia well, although whether it was his uncle'sversion he went by is another matter. It did notprevent him from doing a little research on his ownaccount into the origins of Heracles, with results whichwere certainly not orthodox. In the mind of everyGreek, however, orthodox or not, Heracles was theembodiment of Nike, successful effort. Thus, naturallyenough, his achievements to a great extent reflect theachievements of the race. He is the representative ofGreek colonial enterprise, and so his adventures take himto the remotest points attained by venturous Greek shipsand traders. Every new conquest of Hellenic civilizationadded an episode to his interminable legend. It is notalways easy to decide whether certain of his wanderings,even to distant places, date from the time when theseparts were first visited by Hellenes. For Heracles, Ithink, comes from the prehellenic ' Minoan ' stratumof Greek civilization : and if, for example, he has certainadventures in Thrace, who is to decide whether theseThracian stories belong to the era of the Greek settle-ments in the Chersonese or to an earlier ' Minoanoccupation? But these doubts do not affect a greatmass of details in the later legend of Heracles, whichare clearly the results of travel and exploration inhistorical times.Then there was the Arimaspea. The reputed author

of this wild poem, the ancestor of as wild a progeny,


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14 THE GREEK TRADITIONwas a certain Aristeas of Proconnesus, an island in theSea of Marmora. What we know of him comes fromHerodotus.

' I will tell what I heard men say of him in Pro-connesus and Cyzicus. They say that Aristeas, whoby birth was inferior to none of the citizens, went into afuller's shop in Proconnesus and there died. So thefuller locked the door of his shop, and went to tell thekinsmen of the dead man. But after the tidings hadnow been spread abroad in the town that Aristeas wasdead, a man of Cyzicus, who had come from the city ofArtaca, entered into debate with those who told thetale, saying that he had met Aristeas on the road toCyzicus and had speech with him. Now as this manwas earnestly disputing the matter, the kinsmen of thedead were come to the fuller's shop with that which wasneedful for the burial. But when the building wasopenedno sign of Aristeas, dead or alive ! But in theseventh year thereafter they say that he appeared inthe flesh in Proconnesus, and made those verses thatare now called by the Greeks Arimaspea ; and when hehad made them, vanished the second time.

' This then is what these cities say. But I will nowtell of matters that befell among the Metapontines ofItaly two hundred and forty years (as I discovered bycomparing the stories) after the second disappearanceof Aristeas. The Metapontines say that he showedhimself bodily in their land, and bade them build analtar to Apollo, and set up thereby an image inscribedto Aristeas of Proconnesus. "For Apollo visited theirland only of the Greek cities in Italy, attended by him,Aristeas, whom they now saw before them ; but at thetime when he went with the god, he was a raven ". When


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ON AN OLD MAP 15he had spoken these words he vanished. And theMetapontines relate that they sent to Delphi andmade question of the god, what the phantasm of theman portended. The prophetess bade them be obedientto the vision, if they hearkened to the vision it wouldbe better for them in the end. They took this adviceand performed the due rites. And so there now standsan image with the name of Aristeas beside the altaritself of Apollo, and round it stand laurel bushes ; andthe altar is set up in the market-place.

' I say no more then of Aristeas.'In the poem which he left behind him Aristeas said

that he had visited the tribes of the far north inobedience to a divine impulse. There was a storythat he rode there on a golden arrow. Herodotuscalls him phoibolamptos, a man inspired. He told ofthe Scythians and Issedonians, and of the Arimaspeanswho are one-eyed men, and steal the treasure of thegold-guarding griffins. The story of the Arimaspeansand the griffins became very popular, so popular thatthe poem of Aristeas, who of course never thought ofgiving it a name himself any more than any otherancient poet, came to be called A rvnaspea, 'The Ari-maspean Verses '. The Arimaspeans and the griffinscome into the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, whois as full as Marlowe or Hugo of echoing names bor-rowed from a romantic geography. They fascinatedthe Middle Ages. Sir John Mandeville 'had seenmany a griffoun '. Aristeas did not go so far as that.' Although he is writing poetry, he has not said that hewent farther than the Issedonians.' The truth is thatall this mythical matter may easily lead us to under-value the merit of Aristeas as a geographer and ethno-


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i6 THE GREEK TRADITIONlegist. He perceived, for instance, that the movementsof the Scythians and Cimmerians in historical timeswere due to the Wanderings of the Peoples in CentralAsia, And his geography appears to have been soundenough up to a point indicated by himself. We cannotdoubt that his poem embodied the knowledge gatheredby travellers and pioneers on the northern shore of theBlack Sea.About the end of the sixth century before Christ,

Scylax of Caryanda, a Carian Greek, led an expeditionfor King Darius down some great ' crocodile '-hauntedriver, the Indus or the Ganges, and afterwards publishedan account of his voyage, which Herodotus doubtlessread. The Persian Wars also drove a little geographyinto the most ignorant head. In particular the Greeksof the south awoke to the consciousness that they knewremarkably little about the lie of the land north ofThermopylae, There are traces of this ignorance sur-viving in Herodotus himself But this is a triflingmatter compared with the great conception of theOrbis Herodoteiis. He lived in an age when it waspossible to build up that.He is himself a really great geographer ; and his

greatness and positive superiority to his predecessorsconsist chiefly in this, that he has no theory of whatthe form of the earth ought to be, but is content withit as it is. His attitude on the subject is agnostic andcritical. So indeed is his whole intellectual temperfact not always adequately realized. He says more thanonce ' I am bound to repeat what is currently said 'observe that, it is the point of view of all early, spokenliterature : the necessity of handing on the traditions'but I am not in the least bound to believe it'. It is


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ON AN OLD MAP 17the second clause only that is really significant. In likemanner the religion and morality of Herodotus are con-ventional ; the apologetic scepticism, the demure ironyare the man himself. For this reason he needs as waryreading as Heine. People talked about the Hyper-boreans, men who lived beyond the north wind. ' But ',Herodotus gravely argues, ' if there are Hyperboreansthere must be Hypernotians, men who live beyond thesouth wind, too.' " An absurd argument ", say his com-mentators. Why, yes. . . . But Herodotus was arguingwith people who believed in a symmetrical earth.But Herodotus' scepticism is not of the stupid,

dogmatic sort. His Ulyssean life had taught himthat ' anything may be true ', ' anything may happenin the course of time '. The popular impression of himis still, one gathers, that of a credulous, garrulousancient, a little given to lying. The simple truth isthat he will neither believe anything nor disbelieveanything without a reason which appears to himselfat least plausible. Of course his canons of credibilityare not ours ; although they are not so very much lessrigorous after all. The great thing is that he keeps anopen mind. But he has a natural love of the mar-vellous, and he knows he can tell a story. So he tellsit, and leaves the reader to make of it what he will.The reader, finding him full of prodigious tales, thinksthat Herodotus must have been easily gulled. He wasnot easily gulled. It is possible that here and there heis gulling his readers. He has the genius of the his-torical novelist rather than the historian proper. Thereis more of Walter Scott in him than of Stubbs orGardiner.

Besides, the instinct which prompted him not to3


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i8 THE GREEK TRADITIONreject a story merely because it seemed improbableis a genuinely scientific one. That should be remem-bered to his credit. His method is being more and morejustified every year. For it has given us stories whichare not only exquisite pieces of narrative but are truerthan his critics till the other day had dreamed. Forinstance, the story of certain young braves of the Nasa-monians who got lost in the Sahara. They journeyedfor days across the desert, until they came to an oasis.As they were plucking the fruit of the trees there, theywere attacked by dwarfs who seized and carried themoff. The dwarfs talked in an unknown tongue. Theyconveyed their prisoners over great marshes to a settle-ment of the pygmies, tiny black men like themselves.A great river, with crocodiles in it, flowed past theirkraals. The natives (as the Nasamonians reported ontheir safe return) were ' all sorcerers '. The story is true.The river was the Niger, the native townwho knows ?One reason why Herodotus is so good upon

geography is that he has the imagination of theexplorer.He is a wonderful observer. ' The Maxyes shavethe left side of their heads and let the hair grow longon the right ; and they colour their bodies vermilion.'You see the Maxyes ? Writing like that makes us dis-contented with the indirectness of modern speech. ButHerodotus does not mean to be pictorial, simply. Heis picturesque because he happens to be a master ofstyle, because he cannot help it, because he is 'a manfor whom the visible world exists '. But he is also ananthropologist, interested in the habits of the Maxyeson account of their human significance. What kind ofmen are they who do such things ? What makes them


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ON AN OLD MAP 19do it ? The answer of the geographer Herodotus is :Partly their physical environment. He does not putit in that jargon, but characteristically in the form of astory, the epilogue to his book.

* Artembares was the author of that counsel, whichthe Persians accepted, and commended to Cyrus inwords like these : Seeing that God hath given govern-ance to the Persians and among men, O Cyrus, to theenow that He hath put down Astyages, come, for our landis narrow and barren, let us remove out of it and occupya better. There be many lands nigh to us, and many alsofarther off, whereof if we get one we shall be held in fargreater honour. And meet is it that men that are rulersshould do such things. For when shall there be indeed afairer opportunity than now when at least we are rulersover many men and the whole of Asia ? But Cyrus,hearing these words and misliking their purport, badethe Persians do this thing if they would, but counselledthem to prepare in that event to be no longer rulersbut to be ruled of others. For of a soft land werewont to be born soft men, seeing it was in no wisegiven to the same land to bring forth delightful fruitsand good fighters. Therefore the Persians, assentingto his words, withdrew themselves and departed,being changed in their opinion by Cyrus, and choseto dwell on an ungrateful soil and exercise rule ratherthan to sow the valley and be the slaves of others.'


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THUCYDIDESAncient writers when they speak of themselves areusually content to relate their experiences ; or if theytell us of their emotions, they do not analyse them.Their psychology is creative, not analytic ; thepsychology of the dramatist, not of the philosopherand the man of science. There is hardly any attemptat the exact description of emotional states. Whensuch an attempt is made, it is nearly always curiouslynaive, inadequate, and conventionally phrased. Theyknew what people felt, they could wonderfullydramatize the expression of their feelings in significantactions ; but they could not analyse them. They didnot think of them at all. Ancient egotism was not ofthe introspective kind. It was too social for that, toodeeply absorbed in the game of life. It is the solitarywho examines his emotionsthe outcast, the rebel, thesaint. Such characters were exceedingly rare in oldGreece ; and if they spoke, they would scarcely havefound an audience ; and if they wrote a book, it wasnot likely to be made public. Where the state countsfor everything, the social emotions eat up the individual.Now the ancient man was not merely in the community,he was of it, you might almost say a mode of itsexpression. A ' private citizen ' was either disloyal oran ' idiot'. The great men of antiquity were those who

20


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THUCYDIDES 21shared the common thoughts and aspirations with theinteHigence and intensity of genius. Anatole Francemakes a character in one of his novels say of Napoleonthat he thought what every grenadier in his armythought, only with a greater force. Just as Napoleonwas the child of the Revolution, every great Greek wasthe child of his Polis. Pericles is Athens in one of hermoods, Cleon is Athens in another. That is why theyappear to us so shadowy and impersonal, why they lookmore like types than individuals.

This impression is heightened for us by the mannerin which it is conveyed. We view the men of antiquityalmost solely through the medium of ancient art ; andancient art (by which I mean here more particularlyGreek literature) is animated by a spirit which modernliterature has upon the whole repudiated. Greek artis traditional and conventional ; the modern spirit isprivate and impatient of tradition, and has made ' con-ventional ' a word of reproach. The contradiction isnot so absolute in fact as it looks when stated in words.The Greek artist always brought something of his ownto the conventional theme or motif which he was treat-ing, while we, who in our morn of youth defy theconventions, visibly suffer when our own standardscome to be challenged in their turn. In reality ofcourse the artist can no more escape from all the con-ventions than he can afford to become a copier. Butmy immediate point is this. Greek art, permitting theutmost freedom of treatment within certain limits,insisted on the observance of these limits. Modern artrejects, at least in theory, any limitation at all, even(when the theory is carried to its logical issue) thelimits of sanity. What the modern poet seeks above


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22 THE GREEK TRADITIONeverything else is originality. The ancient poetavoided the appearance of originality. He treated atraditional theme in a conventional style and form,making it in fact the main part of his artistic effortthat he should preserve the convention. But he doesnot merely reproduce, he renovates it. It issues fromhis imagination like Aeson from the cauldron whichrenewed his youth. Every detail receives the signifi-cance it has for the poet and for no other man beforehim. So Greek poetry, extraordinarily conservativein form, may become and is in fact truly original, themost orio-inal in the world. And what is true of Greekpoetry is true of Greek literature in general, even ofhistory, which the ancients regarded as an art and sub-ject to the laws of artistic convention like any other art.The historian indeed is not bound by the convention

in the same way as the poet, for the reason that form,although not more essential, is much stricter and moreclearly defined in poetry than in prose. The historianmay choose a new subject and write of it in a newstyle. But that instinct for continuing the traditionas a thing in itself of infinite spiritual and artisticvalue moves the Greek in other ways. It affects hispsychology, which is content to deal with certaintraditional concepts that to our minds put it out ofalmost all relation to reality. Man is the puppet ofContention, Desire, Temptation, Hope, which areimagined as external forces, personified or halfpersonified Daemons. This theory is nowhere crudelystated even in Herodotus, for it was not fully thoughtout. But it is implied in the psychology not only ofHerodotus but of Thucydides also. It was the tradi-tional theory, the popular belief ; the historians merely


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THUCYDIDES 23qualify and refine it. It could never have satisfied soclear an intellect as Thucydides. But he uses it as faras he can, largely perhaps for want of a more preciseterminology. Clearly, in a psychology of this sort, thequalities which compose what we call a ' personalitywill have little significance. A man becomes theembodiment of a single ' ruling passion ', good or evil.Aristides becomes the Just Man, Pericles the Mag-nanimous Man, Cleon the Violent Man. It is all muchtoo simple, naive, and romantic, and it is slightlyexasperating to an age which reads Dostoevsky andHenry James. It seems to take no account of mixedmotives at all. One can see the effect of this even solate as Tacitus. He has a wayit is very unscrupulousif he knows betterof stating a dilemma of this form :' Tiberius acted so either from this good motive orfrom that bad one.' And, partly because the goodmotive usually wears an aspect of extreme unplausibility,partly because ' we demen gladly to the bader end,' thecharacter of Tiberius suffers. That the emperor mayhave acted on grounds, some of which were creditable tohim and some not, is never suggested. Yet no ancienthistorian approaches Tacitus in the acuteness of hisfeeling for character.We cannot complain that ancient writers are reticent.But it is always ' What I saw ' or ' What I think is thereason ' ; it is never ' How did this affect my outlookupon life ? ' ' What spiritual activities did it call intoplay ? ' Herodotus is constantly speaking in the firstperson ; it is usual to call him ' garrulous '. Does anyone feel that he knows Herodotus, really ? Again,Socrates was constantly discussing himself, talkingwithout reserve about his most intimate feelings. We


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24 THE GREEK TRADITIONknow all about him ; we should recognize him in thestreet. But are not scholars still disputing about the* real ' Socrates ?When people say of Thucydides that the man is anenigma because he is so reticent, they are stating thecase in a misleading way. He is not more enigmaticthan Herodotus or Xenophon, whose character, in spiteof the Anabasis, is so featureless to us that we canmake hardly anything of it. It is certainly true thatThucydides is reticent. No other prose writer ofantiquity is so reserved, or reserved in just that way.But therefore, by a curious paradox, the very reticenceof Thucydides helps us to understand him. It is atrait of character.

He was the son of Olorus, a Thracian name, and onthat side his blood was noble, even princely. He wasthe cousin of Cimon, the leader of the oligarchic partyin Athens. He inherited great wealth, drawn chieflyfrom gold mines on his estates in Thrace. He hadthe very greatest ability. . . . No fairer combination ofopportunities could have been contrived for a youngman who proposed, like Thucydides, to enter publiclife. He rose to high office in the service of the state,was put to the test, andfailed. For twenty years helived in exile, only returning to Athens at the end ofthe war, which he did not long survive. He had meantto be a soldier and statesman. Instead, he wrote abook, full of practical wisdom, of high military sagacity,revealing a grasp of affairs and the trend of politicalforces which we do not find again till we come toPolybius. He could not have failed from incapacity ;and he had all the chances. To what then was his


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THUCYDIDES 25failure due? To an accident, to an error of judgement,to a flaw of character ?He does not tell us himself; and we have not thematerials for an opinion. While he was away with his

fleet at Thasos, he let Brasidas surprise Amphipolis.That is all we know. But although we cannot say whythis should have happened, we can estimate the probableeffect of the incident and of its consequences upon themind of Thucydides. For no history ever written, noteven The French Revolution, is fuller of the ctJios of itswriter. You cannot read the first five sentences ofThucydides without feeling that no one before or since haswritten quite like that. We can study this idiosyncrasyof the author and the interrelations between it and theevents of his life. The impression one receives fromthis study is necessarily coloured by one's own tempera-ment and general attitude to things. But stating it isat any rate a legitimate form of criticism.The youth of Thucydides was passedit was another

of his opportunities in an age and a place where lifewas more vivid and intense and interesting thanperhaps it has ever been since. Athens was recoveringfrom the disasters which had ended in the humiliatinsrThirty Years Peace (446-445 B.C.). She was showingan incredible vitality. Her Empire or Rule (as she toofondly called it), if less far flung, was better organizedand more securely held than ever. No state of Greecehad achieved half so much, or possessed a power likehers. And her energy strained her material resourcesto the utmost. " They have the pioneering spirit ", saidthe Corinthians about the people they hated so, " quickto form new plans, quick to put them into execution. . . ready to take risks, facing danger with a lifting of


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26 THE GREEK TRADITIONthe heart. . . . They make the most of a success, theygive way the least under defeat. An Athenian spendshimself in the service of his city as if his body were nothis own, and counts his mind then most his own when itis employed upon her business. When a plan of theirsbreaks down, they think they have been cheated ; whenit succeeds, it is an instalment of triumphs to come.. . . Their whole life is a round of toils and dangers.Their passion for getting leaves them no time forenjoying. Their one idea of a holiday is doing theirduty, and the most irksome task is better to them thana public sinecure. So that if one were to sum up thematter by saying that they were born neither to restthemselves nor to let other people rest, he would not befar wrong." And Pericles said : " Our enterprise hasburst the bars of every sea and every land, and whereverwe have settled has left imperishable monuments of thebenefits and the injuries we bestow." There survives astone with this inscription :

Of the Erechtheid Tribe,There were slain in the war in Cyprus, in E^t^ypt, inPhoenice, at Halieis, in Aegina, at Megara, ifi the sa?ne year,These ...and then the names. That was as early as 459 B.C.Along with all this fighting and colonizing effort

went a corresponding economic development. Ancienthistorians are almost silent about it ; partly becausethey took for granted a general knowledge on theirreaders' part of economic conditions in Greece, partlybecause, being men of letters rather than statesmen ormerchants, they did not realize the importance inhistory of the economic factor. It is possible to over-


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THUCYDIDES 27estimate it. There is to my way of thinking a tendencyto overestimate it now, at any rate in its effects onancient history. The city-state was, by our standards,so extraordinarily self-denying and 'self-sufficing'although Athens imported most of its foodthat theproblems which are perhaps the chief preoccupation ofthe modern statesman really did not concern it sovitally. Thucydides, who makes so little of all thesequestions of trade routes and food supply, and gives soclear a prominence to the idealistic Funeral Speechof Pericles, gives us after all the right approach toAthenian history. For herself as much as for usAthens was always a ' city of God '. Even the ThebanPindar called her that. No state more passionatelyembraced the doctrine that man cannot live by breadalone. The Piraeus might think differently, and thetradesmen-politicians might fill the city with docks andarsenals. But in her heart she knew that these thingswere, if not ' rubbish ' as Plato said, at any rate the leastpart of her achievement. The Athenians wanted themtoo, of course. They wanted to make Athens queen ofthe world becausewell, because she was so beautiful.This is not my language but Pericles'. It is thelanguage of artists and idealists. It is only the moderndepartmental view of the artist's life that falls to theassault of the economist. No Greek was content to bean artist with a single part of his brain. He put thesignature of his personality upon everything he dideven if it were, as the epitaph of Aeschylus boasts, theright cleaving of the skull of a long-haired Mede. Theinstinct of the world is right ; the Greeks were essen-tially artists. They were dreamers striving to maketheir dream come true, striving to remould the world


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28 THE GREEK TRADITIONnearer to the heart's desire. They were not tradesmenextending the business.

' To live well ' : that was the true end of the state.Athens made what must be accounted the mostsuccessful effort ever made by any community to livewell. There were no poets, no artists like her own ; yetshe drew to herself the artists and thinkers of allGreece. It was the age of Phidias and the building ofthe Parthenon, of Sophocles, of Ionian science and theSophists. No aspect of the genius of Athens wasunfelt by Thucydides. The Speech of Pericles provesthat. The patriotism of which it is the expression isthe devotion of the thinker and the artist as much as ofthe soldier and the statesman. And all these devotionsare fused in one passion, a passion like that of a loverfor his mistress. Pericles sees his Athenians ' gazingupon Her and becoming her lovers ' ; and this seems tobe one of his authentic utterances. For Athens is ' aneducation ' for the rest of the world, and her citizens' care for Beauty and Wisdom without weakness orextravagance '. These famous sentences, unforgettablein the Greek, curiously disappointing in translation,breathe the temper of the age. It is the spirit ofEuripides' early dramas with their passionate romanticpatriotism. It is the spirit of the great ode in theAntigone (442-441 B.C.) celebrating the Progress ofMan, with its opening so natural to an Athenian :

Of many a fnamellous thingMarvel of marvels is Man,Who for his ivayfariitgHath taken the tuhole sea's spanWhen the deep is a glim7ner offoamIn the wake of the stor7n-'wind's wrath.

Where the great seas heave and combHe cleaveth a path.


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THUCYDIDES 29And year by year man tilleth the Earth, though she isthe eldest of the gods. And he captures and tamesthe wild birds of the air, and the wild creatures of woodand hill, and the brood of the sea. And he has foundspeech and thought, and the instinct to live in citieshow Greek all this is!and his devices are without end.Only from Death there is no escape. Yet hath Manfound remedies for many diseases.To the Funeral Speech Thucydides gave a world of

labour and thought. In style it is the most characteristicpart of the History ; and it is also, as we might almostinfer from that, the most characteristic in spirit. It is astatement of the Periclean ideal as Thucydides con-ceived it. How much of Pericles himself is in it we canhardly say now ; there is certainly a great deal ofThucydides. He has woven into it many memories ofmany speeches of the great statesman, and interpretedall for himself and his readers in these laboured,artificial sentences, which seem purposely to veil theirmeaning. The eloquence of the Funeral Speech ismore in the thought than in the words of it. But theeloquence is so great as to make even Demosthenesappear a little empty and rhetorical by comparison.The emotion is so restrained, that a superficial readerwill scarcely notice it, and will feel that Thucydides is' cold '. Even good scholars have called him ' un-emotional '. I cannot say how much I dissent fromthis judgement, ' Undemonstrative' if you like, but notunemotional. My whole assent goes with those whoseinterpretation of Thucydides' mind begins with theconviction that he shared to the full that passion of loveand service to Athens, and that his book is the recordof a shattered dream.


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30 THE GREEK TRADITIONSuch a view contradicts all our first impressions : so

much is admitted. Thucydides appears the very em-bodiment of dispassionate reason. His standards areall intellectual. With him Virtue, it has been remarked,is apt to mean Brains ; and he has been compared toMachiavelli. He is contemptuous of the myths, whichformed what might be called the romantic material ofGreek literature. I had almost called them the onlymaterial ; certainly a Greek audience did not readilylisten to anything else. ' You will not find Romancein my book ', he says in effect ; ' you must go toHerodotus for that ! ' To Herodotus or the Logo-graphers, the compilers of local legends. He is un-sentimental, even for a Greek. He has no MoralTales like the Fable of Solon in Herodotus. There aretimes when the reader is almost angry with him for notexpressing his disapproval of some monstrous crueltyor injustice. It looks cynical to say nothing ; yetThucydides says nothing.

This clearly requires explanation ; and I think anyexplanation would seem unsatisfactory which did notallow for an original bias or quality in Thucydides. Nosensitive criticism can fail to detect in him a certainarrogance or pride of intellect. It is part of the pride Itake to be characteristic of the man ; or rather it is theform in which that pride most naturally expressesitself. He says things like these. ' My book is notwritten for immediate popularity, but to possess alasting value.' Nicias did not merit his dreadful end,for ' he lived in the performance of everything that isaccounted virtue '. That is not perhaps a sneer, but itis a reservation. Thucydides implies that he would nothimself judge Nicias by that standard, but by another,


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THUCYDIDES 31more intellectual one ; measured by which, Nicias waswell, a failure. Observe how he is attracted by proud,intellectual, ' superior ' men: Pericles, Antiphon. Hesays about Homer ' if any one thinks his evidence goodenough '. He says of Brasidas that he was a goodspeaker ' for a Lacedaemonian '. His attitude to hispredecessors in historical writing is not merely critical,like the attitude of Polybius, but slightly supercilious.He scarcely deigns to mention them. No doubt heoften sets Hellanicus right without comment. Heclearly believed that he himself was the first to writehistory as it ought to be written. ^But this propensity was undoubtedly confirmed inhim by certain tendencies of the day. Thucydidesappears to have felt them with that seemingly incom-patible mixture of impressionability and detachmentwhich is characteristic of the Greek genius, and perhapsof all artistic genius. They may be summarized bydescribing his age as the Greek Age of Reason.Nothing was to be accepted as true which did not com-mend itself to the reason. No more superstition, no moremyths, no more false sentiment, no more cant or con-ventionality ; let us get at once to the Truth of Things !Alas for the twentieth century, we have heard that cryso often now ! It has not lost its power to inspire ; butsomehow Truth does not seem any nearer. In thosedays it seemed very near; thanks to Reason or Intelli-gence. At first 'all things were mixed up', saidAnaxagoras; then Nous came and 'arranged' them.The sun was not a god ; it was a white-hot mass' bigger than the Peloponnese ', and the moon hadhouses in it, and hills, and ravines. Protagoras said' Respecting the gods I cannot say that they exist, nor


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32 THE GREEK TRADITIONyet that they do not exist. For there are many thingswhich prevent this knowledge : the darkness of thesubject, and the shortness of human life '. Gorgias usedreason to confute the senses. Our knowledge comesfrom the senses ; the senses are untrustworthy wit-nesses ; and so there is no such thing as certainty. Heheld that, first. Nothing exists ; secondly, if it did exist,we could not know it ; thirdly, if we could know it, wecould not communicate our knowledge. This is the veryhubris of intellectualism. The Sophists, it appears,were in the habit of contrasting things whichexisted by ' nature ' with things which existed by' law ' or custom or conventionality Nomos. Hero-dotus, who is not to be called a Sophist, but was notunaffected by the tendencies which produced theSophistic movement, has a story to illustrate thisantithesis. When Darius was king, he asked someGreeks whom he had summoned to his presence howmuch they would take to eat their dead fathers. Theyreplied that they would not do it for anything ! Dariusthen sent for the Indian people called the Callatiae,who eat their parents, and asked them before theGreeks, who had use of an interpreter, for how muchmoney they would be prepared to burn the bodies oftheir fathers with fire. The Indians shouted loudly andbade him hold his peace. Herodotus adds : ' I thinkPindar is right when he says Custom is Lord of Air.So then, the Sophists were tempted to ask, may notJustice, Morality, Religion itself be simply Custom,Convention ? . . .The philosophical value of Sophistic thought is

perhaps not very great. It is rather childishly para-doxical, and it is grounded upon a very small induction


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THUCYDIDES 33of facts. It set up a number of unreal antitheseslikethat one of Nature and Customof which philosophy-was long in ridding itself But it was not truly sub-versive either of patriotism or morality. To proclaimthe relativity of knowledge, as Protagoras did in hisfamous ' sentence ' Man is the measure of all things didnot in his case have any antisocial or nihilistic intention.He was not thinking of Man but of men, individualcitizens of a city ; and so his doctrine did not come intoconflict at all with the claims of the state. Even to saythat religion and morality are conventions is notnecessarily to attack their validity or their claim uponus for their observance. But in truth the Sophists didnot greatly concern themselves with questions of prin-ciple. They ' drove at practice '. They were apt to beagnostic, to doubt if certainty be attainable. But theymeant to use their brains upon every subject that mendiscussed. Admitting knowledge to be relative, theymeant to know everything. Man's chief end was toknow ; virtue was knowledge and vice a kind ofignorance. Moreover knowledge, although it must giveup the pretence of being absolute, acquired by that verysurrender a new practical value. It fitted a man tosucceed in life. It became an instrument of socialservice. Protagoras professed to teach ' Civic Virtue '.

But Civic Virtue, the quality which made a mansuccessful in public life, was hardly possible in theancient state without the art of speech. So Rhetoric,defined as the Art of Persuasion, became all-important.It was what the Sophists chiefly undertook to teach.Thucydides heard Gorgias of Leontini address theAthenian Assembly in favour of his native city, andcaught from him certain artifices of style which bewray

4


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34 THE GREEK TRADITIONthemselves especially in those passages of the Historyon which the author has spent most pains. Theseartifices have a curious effect on the reader. Theyseem somehow incompatible with perfect intellectualhonesty ; and yet Thucydides is manifestly, is passion-ately sincere. He must genuinely have admired themechanical balance and antithesis, the unusual ' poeticdiction of Gorgias. He uses similar effects himself withgreat power, and is incapable of that triviality andtawdriness which would otherwise seem inseparablefrom the style. We must believe that the style itself,though ' obscure and contorted ' as Dionysius com-plained, appeared to Thucydides to have wonderful newpossibilities, some of which he did actually reveal. Hehad been searching for a style to fit the new ' modernhistory he intended to write, and here was one ready tohis hand. It suited him further because his thoughtwas naturally antithetic, like the thought of all menwith the gift of impartiality. But there was a deeperreason than either of these. The difficult style ofThucydides is the man himself. It is possible to divideauthors into those whose originality consists in sayingplainly what has never been said before, or never soplainly' what oft was thought, but ne'er as wellexpress'd ' ;and those whose originality is in the verystructure of their minds, and makes a certain languagenatural in them, which would seem unnatural in any oneelse. Macaulay belongs to the first division, Carlyle tothe second. Herodotus belongs to the first, Thucydidesto the second. It is somewhat beside the point to arguethat the style of Thucydides is comparatively plain andsimple in the less laboured parts of his book. An artistmust be judged by the finished products of his art,


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THUCYDIDES 35because it is in them that he most truly 'finds himself.And after all, would the Speech of Pericles be equallymoving in any other manner ? That is the question toask, if we wish to know whether Thucydides was amaster of style.The Peloponnesian War gave him his subject. He

was sure that it was to be the greatest war that everhappened, and he was sure that he was the man towrite its history. He intended to make his book amodel of accuracy. He would set down everythingjust as it occurred, without extenuation or malice,accepting nothing merely because it had authority ortradition on its side. I think he agreed with Periclesthat Athens would be victorious in the war, and believedthat the simple truth would do her more honour thanany array of words and arguments. She did not needHomer or any other singer of legendary glories tocelebrate her power and beauty. These were manifestnow and here. There had never been any city like hep;that could be proved by scientific criticism. Homer'sglorification of Mycenae was plainly Contrary to Reason.The war would end in the triumph of Athens and herideals, and his book would be the faithful record of thattriumph, , . .The war began well for Athens. The prediction of

Pericles was justifying itself. And then'the Plaguefirst began to occur among the Athenians '. The onecontingency had happened against which no humanwisdom could have provided. ' Never was such apest or dying of men remembered.' The physicians,ignorant of the proper treatment of the malady, ' diedthemselves '. ' And supplications at temples or oracles,and all expedients of that kindall were of no avail.


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36 THE GREEK TRADITIONAnd in the end people gave them up, overmastered bythe plague.' ' They lay one on top of the other in thearticle of death, or stumbled about the streets andwells, half-dead with thirst.' ' Many neglected patientsthrew themselves into the wells, being possessed by anunquenchable desire ; drink as they liked, it made nodifference. And they were tormented by a perpetualrestlessness and insomnia.' ' The birds and beasts thatfeed on human flesh, in that glut of unburied carcassesyet fought shy of them, or if they touched them, died.'The description of the Plague was one of the most

celebrated things in ancient literature. It is intenselycharacteristic of Thucydides. It is exact and minuteas an official report ; it rigidly excludes any super-natural explanation ; it is carefully unsensational.Withal it is unforgettably vivid, painful and pathetic.Thucydides has here given us an almost perfect ex-ample of his peculiar realism ; and in many otherplaces, as in the harrowing last scenes of the Siciliancampaign, his art is distinctly realistic. To relate,without suppression or distortion but with the vivid-ness of the artist, every relevant thing that happenedprecisely as it happenedthat is his aim in thesepassages, and that is realism. It goes naturally withthe intellectual temper which insists on getting at ' thetruth of things ' ; that temper which we find in Socratesand Euripides as well as in their contemporary Thucy-dides. It is, I think, exceedingly important to observethat this passion for the truth brings in an emotionalelement. The true realism is never coldly objective;the great Realists, we cannot but remember, have allbeen men of fiery convictions. Under words super-ficially unemotional is hidden a profound emotion. We


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THUCYDIDES 37feel it, although we cannot say exactly how it iscommunicated. Its communication is one of the secretsof genius, and this secret Thucydides possesses.We might in any case infer that the memory of thePlague was branded upon his soul, for he was one ofthe few who were attacked by it and survived. Noman could pass through such an experience and be thesame afterwards. Thucydides tells us what he had toface. ' The worst of it was the despondency that seizeda man whenever he felt himself growing ill ; that, andthe way people caught the infection while nursing oneanother and died like sheep. It was this that causedthe highest mortality. For when people were afraid tovisit one another, the sick died without attendance, andmany households were blotted out of existence for wantof some one to wait on their needs ; and on the otherhand, when they did visit, the visitors lost their ownlives ; and these were chiefly such as would be thoughtvirtuous. For they went to the houses of their friends,nobly regardless of their personal safety ; because atlast the very relations of the dead ceased their wailingout of sheer exhaustion, overwhelmed by the extent ofthe disaster.' Those who recovered 'were congratulatedby all the others, while they themselves in that momentof rapture cherished somehow a childish expectationthat they would never die of any disease ever after '.Thucydides remembered that

Here are some more of his memories. ' The sacredbuildings, where some took up their quarters, werefilled with dead, men dying actually in them'anunspeakable horror this to Greek religious sentiment' the malady so tyrannizing over their minds that, notknowing what was to become of them, they disregarded


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38 THE GREEK TRADITIONsacred and profane alike. All the burial customsformerly in use were confounded, and the dead weredisposed of to the best of every man's ability.' ' Alsothe Plague started a general increase of crime. Menventured more boldy upon actions which they formerly-professed to take no pleasure in. For now they sawhow short was the swing between happiness and suddendeath, between poverty and the unexpected inheritanceof wealth. So they made haste to enjoy themselves,looking on their persons and their purses as given themto spend in a day. And nobody was anxious to labourin the cause of Honour ; might he not die before heattained it ? ' ' Neither the fear of God nor the law ofman was any restraint. Seeing all perish without distinc-tion, men concluded that it made no difference whetheryou worshipped the gods or not. As for humanoffences, everyone expected that he would not live topay the penalty for them. Far greater was the doomalready pronounced on themselves and poised to fall.Before it fell, surely they might have one little taste ofthe sweetness of life ?

It is possible that the Plague left Thucydides adifferent man physically. His is not an enjoyingnature ; a little atrabilious perhaps. An illness whichdoes not kill life will often kill the joy of it. Onethinks of Carlyle, who is so like Thucydides in thecombination of idealism with something like its oppo-site. Thucydides would have thought that P'rederickthe Great had 'virtue'. Of course a resemblance ofthat kind is not merely the result of physical causes.The spiritual effects of the Plague upon Thucydidescan be more reasonably conjectured. For one wholoved Athens with that intimate feeling which makes


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THUCYDIDES 39ancient patriotism seem so much more personal thanours, and was I think the passion of Thucydides' Hfe,the mere disappointment must have been terrible. Hehad seen every restraint of religion, of morality, ofordinary decency even, give way under the stress ofpain and fear and horror ; and the people dying ' likesheep ' ; and no one knowing what the end would be.The History is always insisting on the mutability ofhuman affairs. Athens would have won in the War,if the advice of Pericles had been followed ; butPericles died. The Sicilian Expedition would havesucceeded but for a series of miscalculations startedby a perfectly incalculable incident, the Mutilation ofthe Hermae. His military experience may have firsttaught him this distrust of fortune, but it must havebeen greatly deepened by the Plague. He had alsoseen how thin is the partition, not only between pros-perity and ruin, but between virtue and vice ; and thatis a horrible experience. It made him, not exactlycynical, but terribly convinced of the weakness ofhuman nature. The Plague was his first greatdisillusionment.

It did not pass away. The Plague left a new Athensinfected with a spirit he could not share. Pericles fellinto disfavour, and (though he quickly recovered hisauthority) died soon after, with what fears for hiscountry we can imagine. The advocate of the newspirit was Cleon. He was one of those public menGifford and Croker are examples in English politicswho have a faculty of arousing an almost frantic hatredin men of genius. There was something about the veryappearance of this man, his tones and gestures, whichirritated educated and fastidious people like Thucy-


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40 THE GREEK TRADITIONdides and Aristophanes. They were annoyed by hisraucous voice, his ' violence '. They thought him for-ward, ignorant, amazingly conceited ; in a word, vulgar.It is quite probable that Cleon was all of these things.But he was also able, sincere, eloquent in a way, fear-less, incorruptible ; above all, he understood the pointof view of the bourgeoisie to which he belonged, as thearistocrat Pericles could not. It ought to be remem-bered that all our information about Cleon comes fromhis political opponents, who may have shared Pericles'disability. For Cleon had made himself the mouth-piece of a new class in the state hitherto inarticulate,produced by the gradual democratization of Athens.This class had certainly some unlovely characteristicspeculiarly distasteful to Thucydides. It was chauvin-istic and philistine, and irreverent towards the Intel-lectuals ; and it was bent on obtaining a living wage forevery citizen, while Thucydides was wealthy and didnot need to care about money. Even its patriotismprobably struck him as unimaginative. He must havedisliked Cleon before there was any question of hisbanishment. Very likely he came into conflict withhim in the Ecclesia, for Thucydides would scarcelyhave been elected general unless he had come forwardsomewhat prominently in public discussions of militarypolicy. He regarded Cleon as an amateur, at least instrategy. Cleon's theory that Sphacteria could be cap-tured in a week or two was sheer madness. Whatmatter although Sphacteria was captured within thetime? It would not have happened but for a com-bination of most improbable accidents. He behavedlike a fool at Amphipolis. All 'cool-headed' peoplewould have been glad to get rid of him. . . .


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THUCYDIDES 41Does the historian here abandon his habitual fair-

ness ? The question is often asked. I doubt if it canbe answered by a simple yes or no. I think that tosome extent he is unfair. But I cannot believe thathe is moved by personal malice. Thucydides was toogreat and, let us add, too proud a man to let a motiveof that kind influence his judgement. In some ways heis more than fair to Cleon. He puts into his mouth aspeech of great force, acumen, and political courage.The stamp of Thucydides' literary genius is on thatspeech as it is on all the speeches, and Cleon neveruttered it just so effectively as that. The historian infact is following his regular practice of crystallizingin a single speech the spirit of a policy. Here it isthe spirit of the party whereof Cleon was the spokes-man, the party of ' violence '. Cleon becomes the re-presentative of something far more elemental andsignificant than himself, becomes a type, 'the mostviolent of the citizens '. Thucydides is not moved somuch by dislike of Cleonalthough clearly he wasvexed by his mannersas by dislike of the spirit heembodied. For that was hostile to the Periclean spirit.Cleon sneers at ' intellectual ' people, hints that theywere disloyal. The Athenians in his opinion weremuch too fond of art and literature and eloquence' like Sophists ', he adds. They were too sentimentaland quixotic, ' wanting some other than the hard factsof life '. A democracy of that kind, he scolded, couldnever manage an empire. Let us take a closer grip ofthe Allies, and cow them with an example of ' fright-fulness'.How all that would jar upon Thucydideswith the great phrases of the Funeral Speech foreverechoing in his memory, we can easily understand ; and


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42 THE GREEK TRADITIONunderstand, and almost forgive, when he calls a meanersuccessor of Cleon bluntly 'a rascal '.

Thucydides' opportunity came in 424, when asStrategos he sailed with a squadron of ships tomatch himself in Thrace against the brilliant Brasidas.He tells us the story of his failure with such meagre-ness of detail that it is impossible now to determine therights and wrongs of his case. Rightly or wrongly, hewas condemned to banishment, and remained in exiletill the end of the war. It was a fortunate thing that,for Athens and for us, because it gave him specialopportunities for acquiring information, and in par-ticular because it allowed him an insight into theminds of the enemies of Athens and perhaps of someneutrals. It is a curious and teaching thing that GreekHistory is to a preponderant extent the work of menwho were exiles or virtual exiles : Herodotus, Thucy-dides, Xenophon, Timaeus, Polybius. We cannotregret the circumstances which made Thucydides'book possible. But that he himself regretted thembeyond measure, we cannot doubt. The History afterall was but a second best, the best he could give now.We who habitually think of him as a man of lettershave to force our imaginations a little to realize themeasure of his disappointment. But it changed theworld for Thucydides.

His own reticence about it is one of the mostinteresting things in literature. Such a silence was farmore difficult for an ancient than for a modern writer.An author of to-day can afford to ignore a personalattack in the confidence that sooner or later the truefacts of the case will come to light. Thucydides hadno such consolation. There were no reliable sources of


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THUCYDIDES 43information, no Blue Books accessible to the public.Books of any kind were extremely rare and costly, andconsequently little read. In public discussion, of whichthere was more than enough, the merits of a case weresure to be obscured or distorted. As a result ancientliterature is full of apologias, and self-justifications, andpersonal attacks on political opponents. These thingsdisplease us, for we suspect the man who is alwaysloudly proclaiming the purity of his motives. Onesometimes wishes about Demosthenes himself that hewould refrain from so much public washing of linen.We have to stimulate ourselves to remember that aGreek statesman could scarcely help himself. To letyour case go by default was in Greek eyes an admissionof guilt. To treat a public accusation against you withsilent contempt seemed to the average Athenian notonly absurd but, I fear, merely unintelligible. Periclesmight do it. But then everybody knew that thecharges against him were lies. They were just jokes ofthe Comic poets and that scandalous Stesimbrotus, whowasn't an Athenian at all. The position of Thucydideswas quite different. He had been condemned on agrave charge of incompetence or treachery or cowardice.And the man will not defend himself! He fills hisbook with the apologies of unscrupulous politicians,lets everybody have a fair hearing but himself. Didhe really feel that his case was indefensible ? Werethere no extenuating circumstances ? That is sounpleasant for us to believe, that historians have triedto find them for Thucydides. He will not find them forhimself What a pride, or what a confession !

But there is a passage in which he describes the kindof man who failed in the war, and the reasons for his


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44 THE GREEK TRADITIONfailure. However impartially Thucydides might try todiscuss that question, he could not have prevented hisown experience from influencing his judgement. Hisview then is that it was the non-party man who failed.Now Thucydides is himself a non-party man. Thebest constitution Athens ever had, he thought, wasformed by a due admixture of oligarchic and demo-cratic elements. The war brought no greater evil inits train than the exacerbation everywhere of the partyspirit. ' The leading politicians on both sides, whileostensibly promoting what they eloquently called " theequality of all classes in the state before the law",or (on the other side) " sensible government by theBest", merely turned to their own uses the publicinterests they pretended to conserve, and in the heatof their personal rivalries ventured on the mostatrocious actions, pursuing their revenges to theutmost, both sides disregarding every considerationof justice or public expediency, and defining theirobligations by what suited them at the time, and allalike prepared to satiate the spirit of faction by con-triving an unjust verdict against an opponent orsecuring the mastery by force.' ' Words no longerbore the same relations to things, but had their meaningwrested to suit the speaker's mind. Inconsideratedaring was " the courage that makes a good comrade ",prudent delay " a fine name for cowardice ", cool reflec-tion " the caitiff's excuse ", to know everything was " todo nothing ". Frenzied activity was " the true part of aman ", to think out a safe plan of attack was " a speciousexcuse for shirking ". The extreme man was alwaystrusted, his opponent suspect.' ' For the most part itwas the stupider sort who saved themselves. For


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THUCYDIDES 45conscious of their own deficiency and the superiorintelligence of their enemies, and fearing that theywould get the worst of it in public debate, and that thesubtle wits of their opponents would devise a schemeagainst them before they were ready, they acted atonce ; while their victims, presuming in their arrogancethat they would spy the first sign of an attack, andthat there was no necessity actively to secure what theywould get by the use of their brains, were apt to becaught off their guard, and met their end.'

Surely these are significant sentences, coming fromsuch a man. " In the Greece of my time", we mayimagine Thucydides saying, " there was no room for theman who would not sell his soul to a faction, who hadtoo much intellectual honesty to make a shibboleth of aparty cry, who hated the general debasement of themoral currency, who wanted to reflect before he acted."The popular answer to that indictment was : * the manwho will not act till he knows everything will never actat all ' (to irpoQ cnrav ^vvtrov tnl irav apyov). It makesus think of Hamlet, who was no mere dreamer either,but had ' the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue,sword.' Thucydides may well have been overintellectualfor a successful man of action. His mind is naturallysubtle. Observe that curious touch about the clever andthe stupid man, how the clever man paid the penalty forhis contempt of the other's brains. And then considerthis striking sentence : ' Simplicity, the principal ele-ment in lofty character, was laughed away '. Simplicity* silly simplicity ' in the original meaning of the wordcould anything seem less characteristic of Thucydideshimself? It was not characteristic of the Athenians,who, Herodotus tells us, were ' the farthest removed in


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46 THE GREEK TRADITIONmy time from silly simplicity '. But Thucydides meansthat honesty of purpose which thinks no evil and iseasily imposed upon, the quality which reaches a kind ofsublimity in Dostoevsky's Idiot. Why does Thucydides,generally so impatient of anything like stupidity, seemto praise it here ? Because he feels that after all it is afiner thing to be an honest simple-minded man than touse your brains merely to get the better of your neigh-bour. A politician should not be a fool, he thinks ; butwhat a life our politicians lead !There is another character in whom Thucydidescould not but feel a peculiar interest, I mean of coursethe exile. It must be this interest, I think, which asmuch as anything else accounts for the long digressionsin the Plrst Book upon the last days of Pausanias andThemistocles ; for in principle Thucydides objects todigressions. These were in their time the two mostfamous men in Greece. They were powerful, able,arrogant men, and in the end both fell upon evil daysand were cast off by the states they had served so well.The same fate befell the brilliant Alcibiades. Thepsychology of the Greek exile is difficult for us tounderstand. It seems a strange and rather horriblething that a patriot should suddenly become a traitor.Greek history is full of these traitors, exiles schemingrevenge, dreaming day and night of r

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