The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  The Greeks told many strange tales of how the gods—Hermes, Apollo, Athena—had invented these instruments; how Apollo had pitted his lyre against the pipes and flutes of Marsyas (a priest of the Phrygian goddess Cybele), had won—unfairly, as Marsyas thought—by adding his voice to the instrument, and had topped the performance by having poor Marsyas flayed alive: so legend personified the conquest of the flute by the lyre. Prettier stories were told of ancient musicians who had established or developed the musical art: of Olympus, Marsyas’ pupil, who, towards 730, invented the enharmonic scale;* of Linus, Heracles’ teacher, who invented Greek musical notation and established some of the “modes”;70 of Orpheus, Thracian priest of Dionysus; and of his pupil Musaeus, who said that “song is a sweet thing to mortals.”71 These tales reflect the probable fact that Greek music derived its forms from Lydia, Phrygia, and Thrace.*72

  Song entered into almost every phase of Greek life. There were dithyrambs for Dionysus, paeans for Apollo, hymns for any god; there were enkomia, or songs of praise, for rich men, and epinikia, or songs of victory, for athletes; there were symposiaka, skolia, erotika, hymenaioi, elegiai, and threnoi for dining, drinking, loving, marrying, mourning, and burying; herdsmen had their bukolika, reapers their lityerses, vinedressers their epilenia, spinners their iouloi, weavers their elinoi.77 And then as now, presumably, the man in the market or the club, the lady in the home and the woman of the streets, sang songs not quite as learned as Simonides’; vulgar music and polite music have come down distantly together through the centuries.

  The highest form of music, in the belief and practice of the Greeks, was choral singing; to this they gave the philosophical depth, the structural complexity, the emotional range, which in modern music tend to find place in the concerto or the symphony. Any festival—a harvest, a victory, a marriage, a holyday—might be celebrated with a chorus; and now and then cities and groups would organize great contests in choral song. The performance was in most cases prepared far in advance: a composer was appointed to write the words and music, a rich man was persuaded to pay the expense, professional singers were engaged, and the chorus was carefully trained. All the singers sang the same note, as in the music of the Greek Church today; there was no “part song” except that in later centuries the accompaniment was played a fifth above or below the voice, or ran counter to it; this is as near as the Greeks seem to have come to harmony and counterpoint.78

  The dance in its highest development was woven into one art with choral singing, just as many forms and terms of modern music were once associated with the dance;* and dancing rivaled music in age and popularity among the Greeks. Lucian, unable to trace its earthly beginnings, sought the origins of the dance in the regular motions of the stars.80 Homer tells us not only of the dancing floor made by Daedalus for Ariadne, but of an expert dancer among the Greek warriors at Troy, Meriones, who, dancing while he fought, could never be found by any lance.81 Plato described or chests, or dancing, as “the instinctive desire to explain words by gestures of the entire body”—which is rather a description of certain modern languages; Aristotle better defined the dance as “an imitation of actions, characters, and passions by means of postures and rhythmical movements.”82 Socrates himself danced, and praised the art as giving health to every part of the body;83 he meant, of course, Greek dancing.

  For the Greek dance was quite different from ours. Though in some of its forms it may have served as a sexual stimulant, it rarely brought men into physical contact with women. It was an artistic exercise rather than a walking embrace, and, like the Oriental dance, it used arms and hands as much as legs and feet.84 Its forms were as varied as the types of poetry and song; ancient authorities listed two hundred.85 There were religious dances, as among the Dionysiac devotees; there were athletic dances, like Sparta’s Gymnopedia, or Festival of Naked Youth; there were martial dances, like the Pyrrhic, taught to children as part of military drill; there was the stately hyporchema, a choral hymn or play performed by two choirs of which one alternately sang or danced while the other danced or sang; there were folk dances for every major event of life and every season or festival of the year. And as for everything else, there were dance contests, usually involving choral song.

  All these arts—lyric poetry, song, instrumental music, and the dancewere closely allied in early Greece, and formed in many ways one art. As time went on, and already in the seventh century, specialization and professionalism set in. The rhapsodes abandoned song for recitation, and separated narrative verse from music.86 Archilochus sang his lyrics without accompaniment,87 and began that long degeneration which at last reduced poetry to a fallen angel silent and confined. The choral dance broke up into singing without dancing, and dancing without singing; for, as Lucian put it, “The violent exercise caused shortness of breath, and the song suffered for it.”88 In like manner there appeared musicians who played without singing, and won the applause of devotees by their precise and rapid execution of quarter tones.89 Some famous musicians, then as now, engrossed the receipts; Amoebeus, harpist and singer, received a talent ($6000) each time that he performed.90 The common player, doubtless, lived from hand to mouth, for the musician, like other artists, belongs to a profession that has had the honor of starving in every generation.

  The highest repute went to those who, like Terpander, Arion, Alcman, or Stesichorus, were skilled in all forms, and wove choral song, instrumental music, and the dance into a complex and harmonious whole probably more profoundly beautiful and satisfying than the operas and orchestras of today. The most famous of these masters was Arion. About him the Greeks told the tale how, on a voyage from Taras to Corinth, the sailors stole his money, and then gave him a choice between being stabbed to death or drowned. Having sung a final song, he dived into the sea, and was carried on the back of a dolphin (perhaps his harp) to the shore. It was he who, chiefly at Corinth and towards the close of the seventh century, transformed the inebriated singers of impromptu Dionysiac dithyrambs into a sober and trained “cycle” chorus of fifty voices, singing in strophe and antistrophe, with arias and recitatives as in our oratorios. The theme was usually the suffering and death of Dionysus; and in honor of the god’s traditional attendants the chorus was dressed in goatlike satyr guise. Out of this, in fact and name, came the tragic theater of the Greeks.

  5. The Beginnings of the Drama

  The sixth century, already distinguished in so many fields and lands, crowned its accomplishments by laying the foundations of the drama. It was one of the creative moments in history; never before, so far as we know, had men passed from pantomime or ritual to the spoken and secular play.

  Comedy, says Aristotle,91 developed “out of those who led the phallic procession.” A company of people carrying sacred phalli, and singing dithyrambs to Dionysus, or hymns to some other vegetation god, constituted, in Greek terminology, a komos, or revel. Sex was essential, for the culmination of the ritual was a symbolic marriage aimed at the magic stimulation of the soil;92 hence in early Greek comedy, as in most modern comedies and novels, marriage and presumptive procreation form the proper ending of the tale. The comic drama of Greece remained till Menander obscene because its origin was frankly phallic; it was in its beginnings a joyous celebration of reproductive powers, and sexual restraints were in some measure removed. It was a day’s moratorium on morals; free speech (parrhasia) was then particularly free;93 and many of the paraders, dressed in Dionysian satyr style, wore a goat’s tail and a large artificial phallus of red leather as part of their costume. This garb became traditional on the comic stage; it was a matter of sacred custom, religiously observed in Aristophanes; indeed, the phallus continued to be the inseparable emblem of the clown until the fifth century of our era in the West, and the last century of the Byzantine Empire in the East.94 Along with the phallus, in the Old Comedy, went the licentious kordax dance.95

  Strange to say, it was in Sicily that the rustic vegetation revel was first transformed into the comic drama. About 560 one Susar
ion of Megara Hyblaea, near Syracuse, developed the processional mirth into brief plays of rough satire and comedy.96 From Sicily the new art passed into the Peloponnesus and then into Attica; comedies were performed in the villages by traveling players or local amateurs. A century passed before the authorities—to quote Aristotle’s phrase97—treated the comic drama seriously enough to give it (465 B.C.) a chorus for representation at an official festival.

  Tragedy—tragoidia, or the goat song—arose in like manner from the mimic representations, in dancing and singing, of satyrlike Dionysian revelers dressed in the costume of goats.98 These satyr plays remained till Euripides an essential part of the Dionysian drama; each composer of a tragic trilogy was expected to make a concession to ancient custom by offering, as the fourth part of his presentation, a satyr play in honor of Dionysus. “Being a development of the satyr play,” says Aristotle,99 “it was quite late before tragedy rose from short plots and comic diction to its full dignity.” Doubtless other seeds matured in the birth of tragedy; perhaps it took something from the ritual worship and appeasement of the dead.100 But essentially its source lay in mimetic religious ceremonies like the representation, in Crete, of the birth of Zeus, or, in Argos and Samos, his symbolic marriage with Hera, or, in Eleusis and elsewhere, the sacred mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, or, above all, in the Peloponnesus and Attica, the mourning and rejoicing over the death and resurrection of Dionysus. Such representations were called dromena—things performed; drama is a kindred word, and means, as it should, an action. At Sicyon tragic choruses, till the days of the dictator Cleisthenes, commemorated, we are told, the “sufferings of Adrastus,” the ancient king. At Icaria, where Thespis grew up, a goat was sacrificed to Dionysus; perhaps the “goat song” from which tragedy derived its name was a chant sung over the dismembered symbol or embodiment of the drunken god.101 The Greek drama, like ours, grew out of religious ritual.

  Hence the Athenian drama, tragic and comic, was performed as part of the festival of Dionysus, under the presidency of his priests, in a theater named after him, by players called “the Dionysian artists.” The statue of Dionysus was brought to the theater and so placed before the stage that he might enjoy the spectacle. The performance was preceded by the sacrifice of an animal to the god. The theater was endowed with the sanctity of a temple, and offenses committed there were punished severely as sacrileges rather than as merely crimes. Just as tragedy held the place of honor on the stage at the City Dionysia, so comedy held the foreground at the festival of the Lenaea; but this festival too was Dionysian. Perhaps originally the theme, as in the drama of the Mass, was the passion and death of the god; gradually the poets were allowed to substitute the sufferings and death of a hero in Greek myth. It may even be that in its early forms the drama was a magic ritual, designed to avert the tragedies it portrayed, and to purge the audience of evils, in a more than Aristotelian sense, by representing these as borne and finished with by proxy.102 In part it was this religious basis that kept Greek tragedy on a higher plane than that of the Elizabethan stage.

  The chorus as developed for mimetic action by Arion and others became the foundation of dramatic structure, and remained an essential part of Greek tragedy until the later plays of Euripides. The earlier dramatists were called dancers because they made their plays chiefly a matter of choral dancing, and were actually teachers of dancing.103 Only one thing was needed to turn these choral representations into dramas, and that was the opposition of an actor, in dialogue and action, to the chorus. This inspiration came to one of these dancing instructors and chorus trainers, Thespis of Icaria—a town close to the Peloponnesian Megara, where the rites of Dionysus were popular, and not far from Eleusis, where the ritual drama of Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus Zagreus was annually performed. Helped no doubt by the egoism that propels the world, Thespis separated himself from the chorus, gave himself individual recitative lines, developed the notion of opposition and conflict, and offered the drama in its stricter sense to history. He played various roles with such verisimilitude that when his troupe performed at Athens, Solon was shocked at what seemed to him a kind of public deceit, and denounced this newfangled art as immoral104—a charge that it has heard in every century. Peisistratus was more imaginative, and encouraged the competitive performance of dramas at the Dionysian festival. In 534 Thespis won the victory in such a contest. The new form developed so rapidly that Choerilus, only a generation later, produced 160 plays. When, fifty years after Thespis, Aeschylus and Athens returned victorious from the battle of Salamis, the stage was set for the great age in the history of the Greek drama.

  VI. RETROSPECT

  Looking back upon the multifarious civilization whose peaks have been sketched in the foregoing pages, we begin to understand what the Greeks were fighting for at Marathon. We picture the Aegean as a beehive of busy, quarrelsome, alert, inventive Greeks, establishing themselves obstinately in every port, developing their economy from tillage to industry and trade, and already creating great literature, philosophy, and art. It is amazing how quickly and widely this new culture matured, laying in the sixth century all the foundations for the achievements of the fifth. It was a civilization in certain respects finer than that of the Periclean period—superior in epic and lyric poetry, enlivened and adorned by the greater freedom and mental activity of women, and in some ways better governed than in the later and more democratic age. But even of democracy the bases had been prepared; by the end of the century the dictatorships had taught Greece enough order to make possible Greek liberty.

  The realization of self-government was something new in the world; life without kings had not yet been dared by any great society. Out of this proud sense of independence, individual and collective, came a powerful stimulus to every enterprise of the Greeks; it was their liberty that inspired them to incredible accomplishments in arts and letters, in science and philosophy It is true that a large part of the people, then as always, harbored and loved superstitions, mysteries, and myths; men must be consoled. Despite this, Greek life had become unprecedentedly secular; politics, law, literature, and speculation had one by one been separated and liberated from ecclesiastical power. Philosophy had begun to build a naturalistic interpretation of the world and man, of body and soul. Science, almost unknown before, had made its first bold formulations; the elements of Euclid were established; clarity and order and honesty of thought had become the ideal of a saving minority of men. A heroic effort of flesh and spirit rescued these achievements, and the promise they held, from the dead hand of alien despotism and the darkness of the Mysteries, and won for European civilization the trying privilege of freedom.

  CHAPTER X

  The Struggle for Freedom

  I. MARATHON

  “IN the reigns of Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes,” says Herodotus, “Greece suffered more sorrows than in twenty generations before.”1 The Greek nation had to pay the penalty of its development; spreading everywhere, it was bound sooner or later to come into conflict with a major power. Using water as their highway, the Hellenes had opened up a trade route that extended from the eastern coast of Spain to the farthest ports of the Black Sea. This European water route—Greco-Italian-Sicilian—competed more and more with the Oriental land and water route—Indo-Perso-Phoenician; and thereby arose a lasting and bitter rivalry in which war, by all human precedents, was inevitable, and in which the battles of Lade, Marathon, Plataea, Himera, Mycale, the Eurymedon, the Granicus, Issus, Arbela, Cannae, and Zama were merely incidents. The European system won against the Oriental partly because transport by water is cheaper than transport by land, and partly because it is almost a law of history that the rugged, warlike north conquers the easygoing, art-creating south.

  In the year 512 Darius I of Persia crossed the Bosporus, invaded Scythia, and, marching westward, conquered Thrace and Macedon. When he returned to his capitals he had enlarged his realm to embrace Persia, Afghanistan, northern India, Turkestan, Mesopotamia, northern Arabia, Egypt, Cyprus, P
alestine, Syria, Asia Minor, the eastern Aegean, Thrace, and Macedonia; the greatest empire that the world has yet seen had overextended itself to include and awaken its future conqueror. Only one important nation remained outside this vast system of government and trade, and that was Greece. By 510 Darius had hardly heard of it outside Ionia. “The Athenians,” he asked—“who are they?”2 About 506 the dictator Hippias, deposed by revolution at Athens, fled to the Persian satrap at Sardis, begged for help in regaining his power, and offered, in that event, to hold Attica under the Persian dominion.

  To this temptation there was added in 500 a timely provocation. The Greek cities of Asia Minor, under Persian rule for half a century, suddenly dismissed their satraps and declared their independence, Aristagoras of Miletus went to Sparta to enlist its aid, without success; he passed on to Athens, mother city of many Ionian towns, and pleaded so well that the Athenians sent a fleet of twenty ships to support the revolt. Meanwhile the Ionians were acting with a chaotic vigor characteristic of the Greeks; each rebel city raised its own troops, but kept them under separate command; and the Milesian army, led with more bravery than wisdom, marched upon Sardis and burned the great city to the ground. The Ionian Confederacy organized a united fleet, but the Samian contingent secretly made terms with the Persian satrap, and when, in 494, the Persian navy met the Ionian at Lade, in one of the major sea battles of history, the half hundred ships of the Samians sailed away without fighting, and many other contingents followed their example.3 The defeat of the Ionians was complete, and Ionian civilization never quite recovered from this physical and spiritual disaster. The Persians laid siege to Miletus, captured it, killed the males, enslaved the women and children, and so completely plundered the city that Miletus became from that day a minor town. Persian rule was re-established throughout Ionia, and Darius, resentful of Athenian interference, resolved to conquer Greece. Little Athens, as the result of her generous assistance to her daughter cities, found herself face to face with an empire literally a hundred times greater than Attica.