by Will Durant
Out of this unifying influence came the oldest known confederation of Greek states. The Amphictyonic League was originally the religious alliance of the peoples “dwelling around” the sanctuary of Demeter near Thermopylae. The chief constituent states were Thessaly, Magnesia, Phthiotis, Doris, Phocis, Boeotia, Euboea, and Achaea. They met semiannually, in spring at Delphi, in autumn at Thermopylae. They bound themselves never to destroy one another’s cities, never to allow the water supply of any member city to be shut off, never to plunder—or permit to be plundered—the treasury of Apollo at Delphi, and to attack any nation that violated these pledges. Here was the outline of a League of Nations; an outline whose completion was prevented by the natural fluctuations of wealth and power among states, and the inherent rivalries of men and groups. Thessaly formed a bloc of vassal states, and permanently dominated the League.92 Other amphictyonies were established; Athens, for example, belonged to the Amphictyony of Calauria; and the rival leagues, while promoting peace within their membership, became against other groups vast instruments of intrigue and war.
VII. FESTIVALS
If it could not end war Greek religion succeeded in alleviating the routine of economic life with numerous festivals. “How many victims offered to the gods!” cried Aristophanes; “how many temples, statues . . . sacred processions! At every moment of the year we see religious feasts and garlanded victims” of sacrifice.93 The rich paid the cost, the state provided the theorika, or divine funds, to pay to the populace the price of admission to the games or plays that distinguished the holyday.
The calendar at Athens was essentially a religious calendar, and many months were named from their religious festivals. In the first month, Hecatombaion (July-August), came the Cronia (corresponding to the Roman Saturnalia), when masters and slaves sat down together to a joyful feast; in the same month, every fourth year, occurred the Panathenaea, when, after four days of varied contests and games, the entire citizenship formed a solemn and colorful procession to carry to the priestess of Athena the sacred peplos, a gorgeously embroidered robe which was to be placed upon the image of the city’s goddess; this, as all the world knows, was the theme that Pheidias chose for the frieze of the Parthenon. In the second month, Metageitnion, came the Metageitnia, a minor festival in honor of Apollo. In the third month, Boedromion, Athens sallied forth to Eleusis for the Greater Mysteries. The fourth month, Pyanepsion, celebrated the Pyanepsia, the Oscophoria, and the Thesmophoria; in this the women of Athens honored Demeter Thesmophoros (the Lawgiver) with a strange chthonian ritual, parading phallic emblems, exchanging obscenities, and symbolically going down to Hades and returning, apparently as magical ceremonies to promote fertility in the soil and man.94 Only the month of Maimakterion had no festival.
In the month of Poseideon Athens held the Italoa, a feast of first fruits; in Gamelion the Lenaea, in honor of Dionysus. In Anthesterion came three important celebrations: the Lesser or preparatory Mysteries; the Diasia, or sacrifice to Zeus Meilichios; and, above all, the Anthesteria, or Feast of Flowers. In this three-day spring festival to Dionysus wine flowed freely, and everybody was more or less drunk;95 there was a competition in wine drinking, and the streets were alive with revelry. The king-archon’s wife rode on a car beside the image of Dionysus, and was married to it in the temple as a symbol of the union of the god with Athens. Beneath this jolly ritual ran a somber undertone of fear and propitiation of the dead; the living ate a solemn meal in commemoration of their ancestors, and left for them pots full of food and drink. At the end of the feast the people chased the spirits of the departed from the house with a formula of exorcism: “Out of the door with you, souls! Anthesteria is over”—words that became a proverbial phrase for dismissing importunate beggars.*
In the ninth month, Elaphebolion, came the Great Dionysia, established by Peisistratus in 534; in that year Thespis inaugurated the drama at Athens as part of the festival. It was the end of March, spring was in the air, the sea was navigable, merchants and visitors crowded the city and swelled the attendance at the ceremonies and the plays. All business was suspended, all courts were closed; prisoners were released to let them share in the festivities. Athenians of every age and class, brilliantly attired, took part in the procession that brought the statue of Dionysus from Eleutherae and placed it in his theater. The rich drove chariots, the poor marched on foot; a long train of animals followed as destined gifts for the gods. Choruses from the towns of Attica joined or competed in song and dance.—In the tenth month, Munychion, Athens celebrated the Munychia, and Attica, every fifth year, celebrated the Brauronia in honor of Artemis. In Thargelion occurred the Thargelia, or feast of the grain harvest. In the twelfth month, Skirophorion, came the festivals of Skirophoria, Arretophoria, Dipolia, and Bouphonia. Not all these feasts were annual; but even for a four-year period they represented a grateful relief from daily toil.
Other states had similar holidays; and in the countryside every sowing and every harvest was greeted with festal conviviality. Greater than all these were the Panhellenic festivals, the panegyreis, or universal gatherings. There were the Panionia on Mycale, the feast of Apollo at Delos, the Pythian festival at Delphi, the Isthmian at Corinth, the Nemean near Argos, the Olympic in Elis. These were the occasions of interstate games, but basically they were holydays. It was the good fortune of Greece to have a religion human enough—in later days humane enough—to associate itself joyfully and creatively with art, poetry, music, and games, even, at last, with morality.
VIII. RELIGION AND MORALS
At first sight Greek religion does not seem to have been a major influence for morality. It was in origin a system of magic rather than of ethics, and remained so, in large measure, to the end; correct ritual received more emphasis than good conduct, and the gods themselves, on Olympus or on earth, had not been exemplars of honesty, chastity, or gentleness. Even the Eleusinian Mysteries, though they offered supernatural hopes, made salvation depend upon ritual purifications rather than upon nobility of life. “Pataikion the thief,” said the sarcastic Diogenes, “will have a better fate after his death than Agesilaus or Epaminondas, for Pataikion has been initiated at Eleusis.”97
Nevertheless, in the more vital moral relations Greek religion came subtly to the aid of the race and the state. The purification ritual, however external in form, served as a stimulating symbol of moral hygiene. The gods gave a general, if vague and inconstant, support to virtue; they frowned upon wickedness, revenged themselves upon pride, protected the stranger and the suppliant, and lent their terror to the sanctity of oaths. Dike, we are told, punished every wrong, and the awful Eumenides pursued the murderer, like Orestes, to madness or death. The central acts and institutions of human life—birth, marriage, the family, the clan, the statereceived a sacramental dignity from religion, and were rescued from the chaos of hasty desire. Through the worship or honoring of the dead, the generations were bound together in a stabilizing continuity of obligations, so that the family was not merely a couple and their children, or even a patriarchal assemblage of parents, children, and grandchildren, but a holy union and sequence of blood and fire stretching far into the past and the future, and holding the dead, the living, and the unborn in a sacred unity stronger than any state. Religion not only made the procreation of children a solemn duty to the dead, but encouraged it through the fear of the childless man that no posterity would inter him or tend his grave. So long as this religion kept its influence, the Greek people reproduced themselves vigorously, and as plentifully among the best as among the worst; and in this way, with the help of a merciless natural selection, the strength and quality of the race were maintained. Religion and patriotism were bound together in a thousand impressive rites; the god or goddess most revered in public ceremony represented the apotheosis of the city; every law, every meeting of the assembly or the courts, every major enterprise of the army or the government, every school and university, every economic or political association, was surrounded with religious ceremony and
invocation. In all these ways Greek religion was used as a defense by the community and the race against the natural egoism of the individual man.
Art, literature, and philosophy first strengthened this influence, and then weakened it. Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles poured their own ethical fervor or insight into the Olympian creed, and Pheidias ennobled the gods with beauty and majesty; Pythagoras and Plato associated philosophy with religion, and supported the doctrine of immortality as a stimulus to morals. But Protagoras doubted, Socrates ignored, Democritus denied, Euripides ridiculed the gods; and in the end Greek philosophy, hardly willing it, destroyed the religion that had molded the moral life of Greece.
CHAPTER IX
The Common Culture of Early Greece
I. THE INDIVIDUALISM OF THE STATE
THE two rival zeniths of European culture—ancient Hellas and Renaissance Italy—rested upon no larger political organization than the citystate. Geographical conditions presumably contributed to this result in Greece. Everywhere mountains or water intervened; bridges were rare and roads were poor; and though the sea was an open highway, it bound the city with its commercial associates rather than with its geographical neighbors. But geography does not altogether explain the city-state. There was as much separatism between Thebes and Plataea, on the same Boeotian plain, as between Thebes and Sparta; more between Sybaris and Crotona on the same Italian shore than between Sybaris and Syracuse. Diversity of economic and political interest kept the cities apart; they fought one another for distant markets or grain, or formed rival alliances for control of the sea. Distinctions of origin helped to divide them; the Greeks considered themselves to be all of one race,1 but their tribal divisions—Aeolian, Ionian, Achaean, Dorian—were keenly felt, and Athens and Sparta disliked each other with an ethnological virulence worthy of our own age. Differences of religion strengthened, as they were strengthened by, political divisions. Out of the unique cults of locality and clan came distinct festivals and calendars, distinct customs and laws, distinct tribunals, even distinct frontiers; for the boundary stones limited the realm of the god as well as of the community; cujus regio, ejus religio. These and many other factors united to produce the Greek city-state.
It was not a new administrative form: we have seen that there were citystates in Sumeria, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Crete hundreds or thousands of years before Homer or Pericles. Historically the city-state was the village community in a higher stage of fusion or development—a common market, meeting ground, and judgment seat for men tilling the same hinterland, belonging to the same stock, and worshiping the same god. Politically it was to the Greek the best available compromise between those two hostile and fluctuating components of human society—order and liberty; a smaller community would have been insecure, a larger one tyrannical. Ideally—in the aspirations of philosophers—Greece was to consist of sovereign city-states co-operating in a Pythagorean harmony. Aristotle conceived the state as an association of freemen acknowledging one government and capable of meeting in one assembly; a state with more than ten thousand citizens, he thought, would be impracticable. In the Greek language one word—polis—sufficed for both city and state.
All the world knows that this political atomism brought to Hellas many a tragedy of fraternal strife. Because Ionia was unable to unite for defense it fell subject to Persia; because Greece, despite confederacies and leagues, was unable to stand together, the freedom which it idolized was in the end destroyed. And yet Greece would have been impossible without the city-state. Only through this sense of civic individuality, this exuberant assertion of independence, this diversity of institutions, customs, arts, and gods, was Greece stimulated, by competition and emulation, to live human life with a zest and fullness and creative originality that no other society had ever known. Even in our own times, with all our vitality and variety, our mechanisms and powers, is there any community of like population or extent that pours into the stream of civilization such a profusion of gifts as flowed from the chaotic liberty of the Greeks?
II. LETTERS
Nevertheless there were common factors in the life of these watchfully separatist states. As far back as the thirteenth century B.C. we find one language throughout the Greek peninsula. It belonged to the “Indo-European” group, like Persian and Sanskrit, Slavonic and Latin, German and English; thousands of words denoting the primary relations or objects of life have common roots in these tongues, and suggest not only the predispersion antiquity of the things denoted, but the kinship or association of the peoples who used them in the dawn of history.* It is true that the Greek language was diversified into dialects—Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, Attic; but these were mutually intelligible, and yielded, in the fifth and fourth centuries, to a koine dialektos, or common dialect, which emanated principally from Athens, and was spoken by nearly all the educated classes of the Hellenic world. Attic Greek was a noble tongue, vigorous, supple, melodious; as irregular as any vital speech, but lending itself readily to expressive combinations, delicate gradations and distinctions of meaning, subtle philosophical conceptions, and every variety of literary excellence from the “many-billowed surge” of Homer’s verse to the placid flow of Plato’s prose.*
Greek tradition attributed the introduction of writing into Greece to Phoenicians in the fourteenth century B.C., and we know nothing to the contrary. The oldest Greek inscriptions, dating from the eighth and seventh centuries, show a close resemblance to the Semitic characters on the ninth-century Moabite stone.3 These inscriptions were written, in Semitic fashion, from right to left; sixth-century inscriptions (e.g., at Gortyna) were made alternately from right to left and from left to right; later inscriptions are from left to right throughout, and certain letters are turned around accordingly, as and to B and E. The Semitic names for the letters were adopted with minor modifications;† but the Greeks made several basic changes. Above all, they added vowels, which the Semites had omitted; certain Semitic characters denoting consonants or breathings were used to represent a, e, i, o, and ü. Later the Ionians added the long vowels eta (long e) and o-mega (long or double o). Ten different Greek alphabets struggled for ascendancy as part of the war of the city-states; in Greece the Ionian form prevailed, and was transmitted to eastern Europe, where it survives today; in Rome the Chalcidian form was adopted from Cumae to become the Latin alphabet, and ours. The Chalcidic alphabet lacked the long e and o, but, unlike the Ionian, retained the Phoenician vau as a consonant (a v with approximately the sound of w); hence the Athenians called wine oinos, the Chalcidians called it voinos, the Romans called it vinum, we call it wine. Chalcis kept the Semitic koppa or q, and passed it on to Rome and ourselves; Ionia abandoned it, content with k. Ionia represented L as A, Chalcis as L; Rome straightened up the latter form and gave it to Europe. The Ionians used P for R, but in Greek Italy the P sprouted a tail, and became R.4
The earliest uses of writing in Greece were probably commercial or religious; apparently priestly charms and chants are the mother of poetry, and bills of lading are the father of prose. Writing split into two varieties: the formal for literary or epigraphic purposes, the cursive for ordinary use. There were no accents, no spaces between words, no punctuation points;5 but a change of topic was marked off by a horizontal dividing stroke called the paragraphos—i.e., a sign “written on the side.” The materials used to receive writing were various: at first, if we may believe Pliny, leaves or the bark of trees;6 for inscriptions, stone, bronze, or lead; for ordinary writing, clay tablets as in Mesopotamia;* then wooden tablets covered with wax, which were popular, in retrospect, with schoolboys;7 for more permanent purposes papyrus, which the Phoenicians brought from Egypt, and (in the Hellenistic and Roman periods) parchment, made from the skins or membranes of goats or sheep. A metal stylus was used on wax tablets; on papyrus or parchment a reed dipped in ink. Wax writing was erased with the flat butt of the stylus, ink with a sponge; so the poet Martial sent a sponge with his poems to his friend, so that they might be wiped out with a stroke.8 Many
a critic will mourn the passing of this courtesy.
In no field have the old words so regularly come down to us as in that of writing. Paper, of course, is papyrus, and once again, in the cycle of fashion, the substance is a compressed plant. A line of writing was a stichos or row; the Latins called it a versus or verse—i.e., a turning back. The text was written in columns upon a strip of papyrus or parchment from twenty to thirty feet long, wound about a stick. Such a roll was called a biblos, from the Phoenician city, so named, whence papyrus came to Greece. A smaller roll was called biblion; our Bible was originally ta biblia, the rolls.† When a roll formed part of a larger work it was called a tomos, or cutting. The first sheet of a roll was called the protokollon—i.e., the first sheet glued to the stick. The edges‡ of the roll were smoothed with pumice and sometimes colored; if the author could afford the expense, or the roll contained important matter, it might be wrapped in a diphthera (membrane), or, as the Latins called it, a vellum. Since a large roll would be inconvenient for handling or reference, literary works were usually divided into several rolls, and the word biblos, or book, was applied not to each work as a whole, but to each roll or part. These divisions were seldom made by the author; later editors divided the Histories of Herodotus into nine books, the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides into eight, Plato’s Republic into ten, the Iliad and the Odyssey into twenty-four. Since papyrus was costly, and each copy had to be written by hand, books were very limited in the classic world; it was easier than now to be educated, though as hard as now to be intelligent. Reading was not a universal accomplishment; most knowledge was handed down by oral tradition from one generation or craftsman to the next; most literature was read aloud by trained reciters to persons who learned through the ear.§ There was no reading public in Greece before the seventh century; there were no Greek libraries till those collected by Polycrates and Peisistratus in the sixth.9 In the fifth century we hear of the private libraries of Euripides and the archon Eucleides; in the fourth, of Aristotle’s. We know of no public library before Alexandria’s, none in Athens till Hadrian.10 Perhaps the Greeks of Pericles’ day were so great because they did not have to read many books, or any long one.
