The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  Doubtless other Hellenistic cities had libraries. Austrian archeologists have exhumed the remains of an ornate municipal library at Ephesus, and we hear of a great library being consumed in the destruction of Carthage by Scipio. But the only one that evoked comparison with Alexandria’s was that of Pergamum. The kings of this transient state looked with enlightened envy upon the cultural enterprises of the Ptolemies. In 196 Eumenes II established the Pergamene Library, and brought to its halls some of the finest scholars of Greece. The collection grew rapidly; when Antony presented it to Cleopatra to replace that part of the Alexandrian Library which was burned in the uprising against Caesar in 48 B.C., it numbered some 200,000 rolls. Through this library, and the Attic taste of the Attalid kings, Pergamum became, towards the end of the Hellenistic period, the center of a purist school of Greek prose, which considered no word clean that had not come down from classic days. To the enthusiasm of these classicists we owe the preservation of the chef-d’oeuvres of Attic prose.

  It was above all an age of intellectuals and scholars. Writing became a profession instead of a devotion, and generated cliques and coteries whose appreciation of talent varied inversely as the square of its distance from themselves. Poets began to write for poets, and became artificial; scholars began to write for scholars, and became dull. Thoughtful men felt that the creative inspiration of Greece was nearing exhaustion, and that the most lasting service they could render was to collect, shelter, edit, and expound the literary achievements of a bolder time. They established the methods of textual and literary criticism in almost all its forms. They tried to sift out the best from the mass of existing manuscripts, and to guide the reading of the people; they made lists of “best books,” the “four heroic poets,” the “nine historians,” the “ten lyric poets,” the “ten orators,” etc.9 They wrote biographies of great writers and scientists; they gathered and saved the fragmentary data which are now all that we know concerning these men. They composed outlines of history, literature, drama, science, and philosophy;10 some of these “short cuts to knowledge” helped to preserve, some replaced and unwittingly obliterated the original works that they summarized. Saddened by the degeneration of Attic Greek into the Orientalized “pidgin” Greek of their time, Hellenistic scholars compiled dictionaries and grammars, and the Library of Alexandria, in the manner of the French Academy, issued edicts on the correct usage of the ancient tongue. Without their learned and patient “ant industry” the wars, revolutions, and catastrophes of two thousand years would have destroyed even those “precious minims” which have been transmitted to us as the shipwrecked legacy of Greece.

  II. THE BOOKS OF THE JEWS

  Through all the turmoil of the time the Jews maintained their traditional love of scholarship, and produced more than their share of the lasting literature of the age. To this period belong some of the finest portions of the Bible. Near the close of the third century a Jewish poet (or poetess?) composed the lovely Song of Songs: here is all the artistry of Greek verse from Sappho to Theocritus, but with something undiscoverable in any Greek author of the time—an intensity of imagination, a depth of feeling, and an idealist devotion strong enough to welcome the body, as well as the soul, of love, and to turn the flesh itself into spirit. Partly in Jerusalem, mostly in Alexandria, partly in other cities of the eastern Mediterranean, Hellenistic Jews wrote—in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek—such masterpieces as Ecclesiastes, Daniel, part of Proverbs and Psalms, and most of the greater Apocrypha. They composed histories like Chronicles, novelettes like Esther and Judith, and idyls of family life like the Book of Tobit. The Soferim changed the Hebrew script from the old Assyrian to the square Syrian style, which has remained to this day.11 Since most of the Jews in the Near East now spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew, the scholars explained the Scriptures in brief Aramaic Targums, or interpretations. Schools were opened for the study of the Torah, or Law, and the explanation of its moral code to growing youth; such explanations, commentaries, and illustrations, handed down from teacher to pupil across the generations, supplied in a later age most of the material of the Talmud.

  By the close of the third century the scholars of the Great Assembly had completed the editing of the older literature, and had closed the canon of the Old Testament;12 it was their judgment that the age of the prophets was ended, and that literal inspiration had ceased. The result was that many works of this epoch, full of wisdom and beauty, lost the chance of divine collaboration, and fell into the unfortunate category of Apocrypha.* The two books of Esdras may owe something of their literary excellence to King James’ translators; but these can hardly be credited with the touching account of how Esdras asked the angel Uriel to explain why the wicked prosper, the good suffer, and Israel is in bondage; to which the angel answers, in powerful similes and yet simple speech, that it is not given to the part to understand or judge the whole.

  The prologue of Ecclesiasticus describes it as a Greek translation, completed in 132, of discourses written in Hebrew two generations before by the translator’s grandfather, Jesus the son of Sirach. This Joshua ben Sirach was both a scholar and a man of affairs; after seeing something of the world through travel he had settled down to make his home a school for students; and to them he delivered these essays on the wisdom of life.13 He denounces the rich Jews who have abandoned their faith to cut a better figure in the Gentile world; he warns youth against the courtesans who wait for it everywhere; and he offers the Law as still the best guide amid the evils and pitfalls of the world. But he is no puritan. Unlike the Chasidim he has a good word to say for harmless pleasure; and he protests against the mystics who reject medicine on the ground that all maladies, having come from God, can be cured by God alone. The book is rich in epigrams, of which the most renowned brings together the rod and the child. “The number of whippings laid to his account,” said Renan, “must be incalculable.”14 It is a noble book, wiser and kinder than Ecclesiastes.

  In the twenty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus we are told that “Wisdom is the first product of God, created from the beginning of the world.” Here and in the first chapter of Proverbs are the earliest Hebrew forms of the doctrine of the Logos—Wisdom as a “demiurge,” or intermediate creator, delegated by God to design the world. This hypostatizing of Wisdom as personified intelligence becomes a dominating idea of Jewish theology in the last centuries before Christ. Alongside of it runs increasingly the conception of personal immortality. In the Book of Enoch, written apparently by several authors in Palestine between 170 and 66 B.C., the hope of heaven has become a vital need; the success of wicked power and the misfortunes of a pious and loyal people could no longer be borne unless that hope might be entertained; without it life and history seemed to be the work of Satan rather than of God. A Messiah will come who will establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and will reward the virtuous with everlasting happiness after death.

  In the Book of Daniel the whole terror of the age of Antiochus IV finds a voice. About 166, when the faithful had been persecuted to the death for their beliefs, and ever larger enemies were advancing upon the Maccabean band, one of the Chasidim, probably, undertook to rekindle the courage of the people by describing the sufferings and prophecies of Daniel in the days of Nebuchadrezzar in Babylon. Copies of the book passed secretly among the Jews; it was given out as the work of a prophet who had lived three hundred and seventy years before, had borne greater trials than any Jew under Antiochus, had emerged victorious, and had predicted a like triumph for his race. And even if the virtuous and faithful found indifferent fortune here, their reward would come at the Last Judgment, when the Lord would welcome them into a heaven of unending happiness, and plunge their persecutors into everlasting hell.

  All in all, the extant Jewish writings of this period may be described as a mystic or imaginative literature of instruction, edification, and consolation. To the Jews of earlier ages life itself had been enough, and religion was not a flight from the world but a dramatization of morals by the poetry of
faith; a powerful God, ruling and seeing all things, would reward virtue and punish vice in this existence on earth. The Captivity had shaken this belief, the restoration of the Temple had renewed it; it broke down under the bludgeoning of Antiochus. Pessimism now had a clear field; and in the writings of the Greeks the Jews found the most eloquent exposures of the injustices and tragedies of life. Meanwhile Jewish contact with Persian ideas of heaven and hell, of a struggle between good and evil, and the final triumph of good, offered an escape from the philosophy of despair, and perhaps the ideas of immortality that had come down from Egypt to Alexandria, and those that had animated the mysteries of Greece, co-operated to inspire in the Jews of the Greek and Roman periods that consoling hope which bore them up through all the vicissitudes of their Temple and their state. From these Jews, and from the Egyptians, Persians, and Greeks, the idea of eternal reward and punishment would flow down into a new and stronger faith, and help it to win a disintegrating world.

  III. MENANDER

  Like the other arts, the drama enjoyed in this age its greatest quantitative prosperity. Every city, almost every third-rate town, had its theater. The actors, better organized than ever, were in great demand, enjoyed high fees, and lived with characteristic superiority to the morals of their time. Dramatists continued to turn out tragedies, but, whether by accident or good taste, tradition has covered them with oblivion’s balm. The mood of Hellenistic Athens, like ours today, preferred the lighthearted, lightheaded, sentimental, happy-ending stories of the New Comedy. Of this, too, only fragments remain; but we have some discouraging samples of it in the pilferings of Plautus and Terence, who composed their plays by translating and adapting Hellenistic comedies. The high concerns of state and soul that aroused Aristophanes are in the New Comedy put aside as too perilous for the literary neck; usually the theme is domestic or private, and traces the devious roads by which women are led to generosity, and men nevertheless to matrimony. Love enters upon its triumphant career as master of the boards; a thousand damsels in distress cross the stage, but achieve honor and wedlock in the end. The old phallic dress is abandoned, and the old phallic bawdiness; but the story circles narrowly about the virginity of the leading lady, and virtue plays as small a role in it as in our daily press. Since the actors wore masks, and the number of masks was limited, the comic dramatist wove his plots of intrigue and mistaken identity around a few stock characters whom the audience was always delighted to recognize—the cruel father, the benevolent old man, the prodigal son, the heiress mistaken for a poor girl, the bragging soldier, the clever slave, the flatterer, the parasite, the physician, the priest, the philosopher, the cook, the courtesan, the procuress, and the pimp.

  The masters of this comedy of manners in third-century Athens were Philemon and Menander. Of Philemon hardly anything survives except the echo of his renown. The Athenians liked him better than Menander, and gave him more prizes; but Philemon had raised to high excellence the art of organizing a claque. Posterity, being ignored in the subsidy, reversed the judgment, and gave the crown to Menander’s bones. This Congreve of Athens was a nephew of the fertile dramatist Alexis of Thurii, the pupil of Theophrastus, and the friend of Epicurus; from them he learned the secrets of drama, philosophy, and tranquillity. He almost realized Aristotle’s ideal: he was handsome and rich, contemplated life with serenity and understanding, and took his pleasures like a gentleman. He was an inconstant lover, content to repay Glycera’s devotion by touching her name with immortality. When Ptolemy I invited him to Alexandria he sent Philemon in his stead, saying, “Philemon has no Glycera”; Glycera, who had suffered much, rejoiced at having triumphed over a king.15 Thereafter, we are assured, he lived faithfully with her until, at the age of fifty-two, he died of a cramp while swimming at the Piraeus (292).16

  His first play, as if announcing a new epoch, appeared in the year that followed Alexander’s death. Thereafter he wrote one hundred and four comedies, eight of which won the first prize. Some four thousand lines remain, all in brief fragments except for a papyrus discovered in Egypt in 1905; this contains half of the Epitrepontes, or The Arbitrants, and has lowered Menander’s reputation. We shall waste our reproaches if we complain that the themes of these plays are as monotonous as those of Greek sculpture, architecture, and pottery; we must remind ourselves that the Greeks judged a work not by the story it told—which is a child’s criterion—but by the manner of its telling. What the Greek mind relished in Menander was the neat polish of his style, the philosophy concentrated in his wit, and so realistic a portrayal of common scenes that Aristophanes of Byzantium asked, “O Menander, O Life, which of you imitated the other?”17 In a world that had fallen forfeit to soldiers nothing remained, in Menander’s view, but to contemplate human affairs as a spectator indulgent but uninvolved. He notes the vanities and vacillations of woman, but concedes that the average wife is a blessing. The action of The Arbitrants turns in part upon a rejection of the double standard;18 and of course one play is about the virtuous prostitute who, like Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias, refuses the man whom she loves in order to get him respectably married to a profitable wife.19 Lines that are now proverbs appear in the fragments, like “Evil communications corrupt good manners” (quoted by St. Paul20), and “Conscience makes cowards of the bravest men”;21 some credit Menander with the original of Terence’s famous line—Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto—“I am a man, and consider nothing human to be alien to me.” Occasionally we come upon jewels of insight, as in “Everything that dies dies by its own corruption; all that injures is within”;22 or in these typical verses, prophetic of Menander’s early death:

  Whom the gods love, die young; that man is blest

  Who, having viewed at ease this solemn show

  Of sun, stars, ocean, fire, doth quickly go

  Back to his home with calm uninjured breast.

  Be life or short or long, ‘tis manifest

  Thou ne’er wilt see things goodlier, Parmeno,

  Than these; then take thy sojourn here as though

  Thou wert some playgoer or wedding guest,

  The sooner sped, the safelier to thy rest.

  Well-furnished, foe to none, with strength at need,

  Shalt thou return; while he who tarries late

  Faints on the road out-worn, with age oppressed,

  Harassed by foes whom life’s dull tumults breed;

  Thus ill dies he for whom death long doth wait.23

  IV. THEOCRITUS

  When Philemon died (262) Greek comedy, and in large measure Athenian literature, died with him. The theater flourished, but it produced no masterpieces that time or scholarship thought fit to preserve; and the repetition of old comedies—chiefly those of Menander and Philemon—more and more crowded out original productions. As the third century ended, the spirit of the gay society that had generated the New Comedy died away, and was replaced in Athens by the serious mood of the philosophical schools. Other cities, Alexandria in particular, tried to transplant the dramatic art, but failed.

  The great Library and the scholars whom it had attracted set the tone of Alexandrian literature. Books had to meet the tastes of a learned and critical audience, sophisticated by science and history. Even poetry became erudite, and tried to cover up the poverty of its fancy with recondite allusions and subtle turns of phrase. Callimachus wrote dead hymns to dead gods, pretty epigrams that sparkled for a day, judicious eulogies like The Lock of Berenice, and a didactic poem on Causes (Aitia) which contained much learned lore from geography, mythology, and history, and one of the earliest love stories in literature. Acontius, hero of this tale, is incredibly handsome, and Cydippe is painfully beautiful; they fall in love at first sight, are opposed by their money-minded parents, threaten suicide, half die of broken hearts, and finally end the romance with marriage; this is the story that a million poets and novelists have told since then, and which a million more will tell. It must be added, however, that in one of his epigrams Callimachus returned to more orthod
ox Greek tastes:

  Drink now, and love, Democrates;

  for we Shall not have wine and boys eternally.24

  His only rival in his century was his pupil Apollonius of Rhodes. When the student poached upon the master’s verses and competed for the favor of the Ptolemies, the two men quarreled in life and print, and Apollonius returned to Rhodes. He proved his courage by writing, in an age that preferred brevity; a very passable epic, the Argonautica. Callimachus dismissed it with an epigram—“A big book is a big evil”—of whose truth the reader may find an instance at close hand. In the end Apollonius was rewarded; he received the coveted appointment of librarian, and even persuaded some of his contemporaries to read his epic. It still survives, and contains an excellent psychological study of Medea’s love; but it is not indispensable to a modern education.*

  The rise of pastoral poetry betrays almost statistically the growth of an urban civilization. The Greeks of earlier centuries had said little about the beauty of the countryside because most of them had once lived on farms or near them, and knew the lonely hardships, as well as the quiet beauty, of rural life. Doubtless the Alexandria of the Ptolemies was as hot and dusty as Alexandria is today, and the Greeks who lived in it looked back with idealizing memory upon the hills and fields of their motherland; the great city was just the place to breed bucolic poetry. Thither came, about 276, a confident young man with the pleasant name of Theocritus. He had begun life in Sicily, and had continued it in Cos; he had returned to Syracuse to seek the patronage of Hieron II, and had failed; but he could never forget the beauty of Sicily, its mountains and flowers, its coasts and bays. He moved to Alexandria, composed a panegyric on Ptolemy II, and won the passing favor of the court. For some years he seems to have lived amid royalty and scholarship, while his melodious pictures of country life made him popular among the sophisticates of the capital. His Praxinoa describes the terror of Alexandria’s crowded streets: