The Life of Greece
Page 21
Though he finds a consoling constancy in the Eternal Fire, Heracleitus is troubled by its endless transformations; and the second nucleus of his thought is the eternity and ubiquity of change. He finds nothing static in the universe, the mind, or the soul. Nothing is, everything becomes; no condition persists unaltered, even for the smallest moment; everything is ceasing to be what it was, and is becoming what it will be. Here is a new emphasis in philosophy: Heracleitus does not merely ask, like Thales, what things are, but, like Anaximander, Lucretius, and Spencer, how they became what they are; and he suggests, like Aristotle, that a study of the second question is the best approach to the first. The extant apophthegms do not contain the famous formula, panta rei, ouden menei—“all things flow, nothing abides”; but antiquity is unanimous in attributing it to Heracleitus.56 “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on to you” (41); “we are and we are not” (81); here, as in Hegel, the universe is a vast Becoming. Multiplicity, variety, change are as real as unity, identity, being; the Many are as real as the One.57 The Many are the One; every change is a passage of things towards or from the condition of Fire. The One is the Many; in the very heart of Fire flickers restless change.
Hence Heracleitus passes to the third element in his philosophy—the unity of opposites, the interdependence of contraries, the harmony of strife. “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger” (36). “Good and bad are the same; goodness and badness are one” (57-8); “life and death are the same; so are waking and sleeping, youth and age” (78). All these contraries are stages in a fluctuating movement, moments of the ever-changing Fire; each member in an opposing pair is necessary to the meaning and existence of the other; reality is the tension and interplay, the alternation and exchange, the unity and harmony, of opposites. “They understand not how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There sits attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the harp” (45). As the tension of the string, loosened or drawn taut, creates the harmony of vibrations called music or a note, so the alternation and strife of opposites creates the essence and meaning and harmony of life and change. In the struggle of organism with organism, of man with man, of man with woman, of generation with generation, of class with class, of nation with nation, of idea with idea, of creed with creed, the warring opposites are the warp and woof on the loom of life, working at cross-purposes to produce the unseen unity and hidden concord of the whole. “From things that differ comes the fairest attunement” (46); any lover will understand.
All three of these principles—fire, change, and the tension unity of contraries—enter into Heracleitus’ conception of soul and God. He smiles at men who “seek in vain to purify themselves from blood-guiltiness by defiling themselves with blood” (130), or who “offer prayers to these statues here—as if one should try to converse with houses; such men know nothing of the real nature of gods” (126). Nor will he admit personal immortality; man too, like everything else, is a changeful and fitful flame, “kindled and put out like a light in the night” (77). Even so, man is Fire; the soul or vital principle is part of the eternal energy in all things; and as such it never dies. Death and birth are arbitrary points taken in the current of things by the human analyzing mind; but from the impartial standpoint of the universe they are merely phases in the endless change of forms. At every instant some part of us dies while the whole lives; at every second one of us dies while Life lives. Death is a beginning as well as an ending; birth is an ending as well as a beginning. Our words, our thoughts, even our morals, are prejudices, and represent our interests as parts or groups; philosophy must see things in the light of the whole. “To God all things are beautiful and good and right; men deem some things wrong and some right” (61).
As the soul is a passing tongue of the endlessly changing flame of life, so God is the everlasting Fire, the indestructible energy of the world. He is the unity binding all opposites, the harmony of all tensions, the sum and meaning of all strife. This Divine Fire, like life (for the two are everywhere and one), is always altering its form, always passing upward or downward on the ladder of change, always consuming and remaking things; indeed, some distant day, “Fire will judge and convict all things” (26), destroy them, and make way for new forms, in a Last Judgment or cosmic catastrophe. Nevertheless, the operations of the Undying Fire are not without sense and order; if we could understand the world as a whole we should see in it a vast impersonal wisdom, a Logos or Reason or Word (65); and we should try to mold our lives into accord with this way of Nature, this law of the universe, this wisdom or orderly energy which is God (91). “It is wise to hearken not to me, but to the Word” (1), to seek and follow the infinite reason of the whole.
When Heracleitus applies to ethics these four basic concepts of his thought—energy, change, the unity of opposites, and the reason of the whole—he illuminates all life and conduct. Energy harnessed to reason, wedded to order, is the greatest good. Change is not an evil but a boon; “in change one finds rest; it is weariness to be always toiling at the same things and always beginning afresh” (72-3). The mutual necessity of contraries makes intelligible and therefore forgivable the strife and suffering of life. “For men to get all they wish is not the better thing; it is disease that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; toil, rest” (104). He rebukes those who desire an end of strife in the world (43); without this tension of opposites there would be no “attunement,” no weaving of the living web, no development. Harmony is not an ending of conflict, it is a tension in which neither element definitely wins, but both function indispensably (like the radicalism of youth and the conservatism of old age). The struggle for existence is necessary in order that the better may be separated from the worse, and may generate the highest. “Strife is the father of all and the king of all; some he has marked out to be gods, and some to be men; some he has made slaves, and some free” (44). In the end, “strife is justice” (62); the competition of individuals, groups, species, institutions, and empires constitutes nature’s supreme court, from whose verdict there is no appeal.
All in all, the philosophy of Heracleitus, concentrated for us now in 130 fragments, is among the major products of the Greek mind. The theory of the Divine Fire passed down into Stoicism; the notion of a final conflagration was transmitted through Stoicism to Christianity; the Logos, or reason in nature, became in Philo and Christian theology the Divine Word, the personified wisdom with which or through whom God creates and governs all things; in some measure it prepared for the early modern view of natural law. Virtue as obedience to nature became a catchword of Stoicism; the unity of opposites revived vigorously in Hegel; the idea of change came back into its own with Bergson. The conception of strife and struggle as determining all things reappears in Darwin, Spencer, and Nietzsche—who carries on, after twenty-four centuries, the war of Heracleitus against democracy.
We know almost nothing of Heracleitus’ life; and of his death we have only an unsupported story in Diogenes Laertius, which may illustrate the prosaic ends to which our poetry may return:
And at last becoming a complete misanthrope, he used to spend his time walking about the mountains, feeding on grasses and plants; and in consequence of these habits he was attacked by the dropsy, and so he returned to the city, and asked the physicians, in a riddle, whether they were able to produce a drought after wet weather. And as they did not understand him, he shut himself up in a stable for oxen, and covered himself with cow dung, hoping to cause the wet to evaporate from him by the warmth that this produced. And as he did himself no good in this way, he died, having lived seventy years.58
4. Anacreon of Teos
Colophon, a few miles north of Ephesus, derived its name, presumably, from the hill on whose slope it rose.* Xenophanes the anticlerical, born among them about 576, described the Colophonians as “richly clothed in purple garments, proud of their luxuriously dressed hair wet with costly and sweet-sm
elling oils”; vanity has a long history.60 Here, and perhaps at Smyrna, the poet Mimnermus (610) sang, for a people already infected with the languid pessimism of the East, his melancholy odes of fleeting youth and love. He lost his heart to Nanno, the girl who accompanied his songs with the plaintive obbligato of the flute; and when she rejected his love (perhaps on the ground that a poet married is a poet dead), he immortalized her with a sheaf of delicate elegiac verse.
We blossom like the leaves that come in Spring,
What time the sun begins to flame and glow,
And in the brief span of youth’s gladdening
Nor good nor evil from the gods we know;
But always at the goal dark spirits stand
Holding, one grievous Age, one Death, within her hand.61
A more famous poet lived a century later in the near-by town of Teos. Anacreon wandered much, but in Teos he was born (563) and died (478). Many a court sought him, for among his contemporaries only Simonides rivaled him in fame. We find him joining a band of emigrants to Thracian Abdera, serving as soldier for a campaign or two, abandoning his shield in the poetic fashion of the time, and thereafter content to brandish a pen; spending some years at the court of Polycrates in Samos; brought thence in official state, on a fifty-oared galley, to grace the palace of Hipparchus in Athens; and at last, after the Persian War, returning to Teos to ease his declining years with song and drink. He paid for his excesses by living to a great age, and died at eighty-five, we are told, of a grape pit sticking in his throat.62
Alexandria knew five books of Anacreon, but only disordered couplets remain. His subjects were wine, women, and boys; his manner was one of polished banter in tripping iambics. No topic seemed impure in his impeccable diction, or gross in his delicate verse. Instead of the vulgar virulence of Hipponax, or the trembling intensity of Sappho, Anacreon offered the urbane chatter of a court poet who would play Horace to any Augustus that pleased his fancy and paid for his wine. Athenaeus thinks that his tipsy songs and changeful loves were a pose;63 perhaps Anacreon hid his fidelities that he might be interesting to women, and concealed his sobriety to augment his fame. A choice legend tells how, in his cups, he stumbled against a child and abused it with harsh words, and how, in his age, he fell in love with this lad and did penance with doting praise.64 His Eros was ambidextrous, and reached impartially for either sex; but in his later years he gallantly gave the preference to women. “Lo, now,” says a pretty fragment, “golden-haired Love strikes me with his purple ball, and calls me forth to play with a motley-slippered maid. But she hails from lofty Lesbos, and so finds fault with my white hair, and goes a-searching for other prey.”65 A wit of a later age wrote for Anacreon’s grave a revealing epitaph:
All-enchanting nurse of the wine, O Vine, grow lush and long above the tomb of Anacreon. So shall the tippling friend of neat liquor, who thrummed in night-long revel the lute of a lover of lads, yet sport above his buried head the glorious cluster of some teeming bough, and be wet evermore with the dew whose delicious scent was the breath of his mild old mouth.66
5. Chios, Smyrna, Phocaea
From Teos the mainland staggers westward in vacillating bays and promontories until, across ten miles of sea, the traveler reaches Chios. Here, amid groves of figs and olives, and Anacreontic vines, Homer may have spent his youth. Wine making was a major industry in Chios, and used many slaves; in 431 the island had 30,000 freemen, 100,000 slaves.67 Chios became a clearinghouse for slaves; slave dealers bought the families of insolvent debtors from their creditors, and purchased boys to make eunuchs of them for the palaces of Lydia and Persia.68 In the sixth century Drimachus led his fellow slaves in revolt, defeated all armies sent against him, established himself in a mountain fastness, levied toll upon the richer citizens by discriminating robbery, offered them “protection” for a consideration after our own fashion, terrified them into dealing more justly with their slaves, gave his voluntarily severed head to his friends so that they might claim the reward that had been promised for it, and was worshiped for centuries afterward as the patron deity of slaves:69 here is an excellent epic for some Spartacus of the pen. Art and literature flourished amid the wealth and bondage of Chios; here the Homeridae, a guild and succession of bards, had their seat; here Ion the dramatist and Theopompus the historian would be born; here Glaucus (tradition said) discovered, about 560, the technique of welding iron; here Archermus and his sons, Bupalus and Athenis, made the finest statuary in sixth-century Greece.
Returning to the mainland, the traveler passes by the sites of Erythrae and Clazomenae—birthplace of Pericles’ teacher and friend, Anaxagoras. Farther east, on a well-sheltered inlet, is Smyrna. Settled by Aeolians as far back as 101570 it was changed by immigration and conquest into an Ionian city. Already famous in the days of Achilles, sacked by Alyattes of Lydia about 600 B.C., destroyed again and again, and recently by the Greeks in A.D. 1924, Smyrna, rivaling Damascus in age, has known all the vicissitudes of history.* The remains of the ancient town suggest its rich and varied life; a gymnasium, an acropolis, a stadium, and a theater have been dug out of the earth. The avenues were broad and well paved; temples and palaces adorned them; the main street, called Golden, was famous throughout Greece.
The northernmost of Ionia’s cities was Phocaea, still functioning as Fokia. The river Hermus connected it almost with Sardis itself, and gave it a lucrative advantage in the commerce of the Greeks with Lydia. Phocaean merchants undertook distant voyages in the search for markets; it was they who brought Greek culture to Corsica, and founded Marseilles.
Such were the Twelve Cities of Ionia, seen superficially as if in an hour’s flight through space and time. Though they were too competitive and jealous to form a union for mutual defense, their citizens acknowledged some solidarity of background and interest, and met periodically on the promontory of Mycale near Priene, in the great festival of the Panionium. Thales begged them to form a sympolity in which every adult male would be a citizen both of his city and of a Panionian union; but commercial rivalries were too strong, and led rather to internecine wars than to political unity. Hence, when the Persian attack came (546-5), the alliance improvised for defense proved rootlessly weak, and the Ionian cities came under the power of the Great King. Nevertheless this spirit of independence and rivalry gave to the Ionian communities the stimulus of competition and the zest of liberty. It was under these conditions thatJonia developed science, philosophy, history, and the Ionic capital, while at the same time it produced so many poets that the sixth century in Hellas seems almost as fertile as the fifth. When Ionia fell her cities bequeathed their culture to the Athens that had fought to save them, and transmitted to it the intellectual leadership of Greece.
V. SAPPHO OF LESBOS
Above the Ionian Dodecapolis lay the twelve cities of mainland Aeolis, settled by Aeolians and Achaeans from northern Greece soon after the fall of Troy had opened Asia Minor to Greek immigration. Most of these cities were small, and played a modest role in history; but the Aeolian isle of Lesbos rivaled the Ionian centers in wealth, refinement, and literary genius. Its volcanic soil made the island a very garden of orchards and vines. Of its five cities Mytilene was the greatest, almost as rich, through its commerce, as Miletus, Samos, and Ephesus. Towards the end of the seventh century a coalition of the mercantile classes with the poorer citizens overthrew the landed aristocracy, and made the brave, rough Pittacus dictator for ten years, with powers like those of his friend and fellow Wise Man, Solon. The aristocracy conspired to recapture power, but Pittacus foiled them and exiled their leaders, including Alcaeus and Sappho, first from Mytilene and then from Lesbos itself.
Alcaeus was a roistering firebrand who mingled politics with poetry and made every other lyric raise the tocsin of revolt. Of aristocratic birth, he attacked Pittacus with a lusty scurrility that merited the crown of banishment. He molded his own poetic forms, to which posterity gave the name “alcaics”; and every stanza, we are told, had melody and charm. For a while
he sang of war, and described his home as hung with martial trophies and accouterments;71 however, when his own chance for heroism came he threw away his shield, fled like Archilochus, and complimented himself lyrically on the valor of his discretion. Occasionally he sang of love, but dearest to his pen was the wine for which Lesbos was as famous as for its poetry. Nun chre methusthen, he advises us: nunc bibamus, let us drink deeply; in summer to cool our thirst, in autumn to put a bright color upon death, in winter to warm our blood, in spring to celebrate nature’s resurrection.
The rain of Zeus descends, and from high heaven
A storm is driven,
And on the running water-brooks the cold
Lays icy hold.
Then up! beat down the winter, make the fire
Blaze higher and higher;
Mix wine as sweet as honey of the bee
Abundantly;
Then drink, with comfortable wool around
Your temples bound.
We must not yield our hearts to woe, or wear