The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  † It is no longer agreed that the square depressions found in the floors of some rooms were baths; they have no outlets, and are made of gypsum, which water would gradually dissolve.37

  ‡ Mosso found similar drainage pipes in the villa at Hagia Triada. “One day, after a heavy downpour of rain, I was interested to find that all the drains acted perfectly, and I saw the water flow from the sewers, through which a man could walk upright. I doubt if there is any other instance of a drainage system acting after four thousand years.”40

  * If archeological chronology would permit the deferment of this conflagration to the neighborhood of 1250 it would be convenient to interpret the tragedy as an incident in the Achaean conquest of the Aegean preliminary to the siege of Troy.

  * Pausanias, father of all Baedekers, credits Daedalus with several statues, mostly of wood, and a marble relief of Ariadne dancing, as all extant in the second century A.D.51 The Greeks never doubted the reality of Daedalus, and the experience of Schliemann warns us to be skeptical even of our skepticism. Old traditions have a way of being easily rejected by one generation of scholars, and laboriously confirmed by the next.

  * The Athenians counted all this as history. They treasured for centuries, by continually repairing it, the ship in which Theseus had sailed to Crete, and used it as a sacred vessel in sending envoys annually to the feast of Apollo at Delos.

  * “In order to acquire quickly the Greek vocabulary,” Schliemann writes, “I procured a modern Greek translation of Paul et Virginie, and read it through, comparing every word with its equivalent in the French original. When I had finished this task I knew at least one half the Greek words the book contained; and after repeating the operation I knew them all, Of nearly so, without having lost a single minute by being obliged to use a dictionary. . . . Of the Greek grammar I learned only the declensions and the verbs, and never lost my precious time in studying its rules; for as I saw that boys, after being troubled and tormented for eight years and more in school with the tedious rules of grammar, can nevertheless none of them write a letter in ancient Greek without making hundreds of atrocious blunders, I thought the method pursued by the schoolmasters must be altogether wrong. . . . I learned ancient Greek I would have learned a living language.”5

  * Pausanias traveled through Greece about A.D. 160, and described it in his Periegesis, or Tour.

  * Towards the end of his life Dörpfeld and Virchow almost convinced him that he had found the remains not of Agamemnon but of a far earlier generation. After many heartaches Schliemann took the matter good-naturedly. “What?” he exclaimed, “so this is not Agamemnon’s body, these are not his ornaments? All right, let’s call him Schulze”; and thereafter they always spoke of “Schulze.”13

  † The Greeks gave the name Cyclopean to such structures as in their mythical fancy could have been built only by giants like the one-eyed Titans called Cyclopes (Round-Eyes), who labored at the forges of Hephaestus in the volcanoes of the Mediterranean. Architecturally the term implied large unmortared stones, unhewn or roughly cut, and filled in at the joints with pebbles laid in clay. Tradition added that Proetus had imported celebrated masons, called Cyclopes, from Lycia.

  * Sedulously collected by General di Cesnola, and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

  * Dr. Carl Blegen, field director of the University of Cincinnati excavations at Troy (193if), believes that these have shown that Troy VI was destroyed about 1300, probably by earthquake, and that upon its ruins rose the Seventh City, which he calls Priam’s Troy. Dörpfeld prefers to call this Troy VIb. Cf. Journal of Hellenic Studies, LV1, 156.

  † (7) Troy VII was a small unfortified settlement, which occupied the site till (8) Alexander the Great, in 334, built upon it Troy VIII in homage to Homer. (9) About the beginning of the Christian era the Romans built Novum Ilium, or New Troy, which survived till the fifth century A.D.

  ‡ The name Troy was traced by Greek tradition to the eponymous hero Tros, father of Ilus, father of Laomedon, father of Priam.39 Hence the variant names of the city—Troas, Ilios, Ilion, Ilium. An eponymous hero, or eponym, is a probably legendary person to whom a social or political group attributes its origin and name. The Dardani, for example, believed or pretended that they were descended from Dardanus, son of Zeus; so the Dorians traced tnemselves to Dorus, the Ionians to Ion, etc.

  * And in such Greek words as sesamon (sesame), kyparissos (cypress), hyssopos (hyssop), oinos (wine), sandalon (sandal), chalkos (copper), thalassa (sea), molybdos (lead), zephyros (zephyr), kybernao (steer), sphongos (sponge), laos (people), labyrinthis, dithyrambos, kitharis (zither), syrinx (flute), and paian (paean).

  † “Perseus . . . Heracles . . . Minos, Theseus, Jason . . . it has been common in modern times to regard these and the other heroes of this age . . . as purely mythical creations. The later Greeks, in criticizing the records of their past, had no doubt that they were historical persons who actually ruled in Argos and other kingdoms; and after a period of extreme skepticism many modern critics have begun to revert to the Greek view as that which explains the evidence most satisfactorily. . . . The heroes of the tales, like the geographical scenes in which they moved, are real.”—Cambridge Ancient History, II, 478. We shall assume that the major legends are true in essence, imaginative in detail.

  * Tantalus angered the gods by divulging their secrets, stealing their nectar and ambrosia, and offering them his son Pelops, boiled and sliced. Zeus put Pelops together again, and punished Tantalus, in Hades, with a raging thirst; Tantalus was placed in the midst of a lake whose waters receded whenever he tried to drink of them; over his head branches rich in fruit were hung, which withdrew when he sought to reach them; a great rock was suspended above him, which at every moment threatened to fall and crush him.7

  * Assigned to 1400-1200 B.C. It contained fragments of writing in undeciphered characters, probably of Cretan lineage.

  * “Zeus,” says Diodorus, “made that night three times its normal length; and by the magnitude of the time expended on the procreation he presaged the exceptional might of the child.”9

  † He strangled the lion that troubled the flocks at Nemea; he destroyed the many-headed hydra that ravaged Lerna; he captured a fleet stag and carried it to Eurystheus; he caught a wild boar from Mt. Eurymanthus and carried it to Eurystheus; in one day he cleansed all the stables of Augeas’ three thousand oxen by diverting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus into the stills—and paused long enough in Elis to establish the Olympic games; he destroyed the murderous Stymphalian birds of Arcadia; he captured the mad bull that was devastating Crete, and carried it on his shoulders to Eurystheus; he caught and tamed the man-eating horses of Diomedes; he slew nearly all the Amazons; he set up two confronting promontories as the “Pillars of Hercules” at the mouth of the Mediterranean, captured the oxen of Geryon and brought them through Gaul, across the Alps, through Italy, and across the sea to Eurystheus; he found the apples of the Hesperides, and for a while held up the earth for Atlas; he descended into Hades, and delivered Theseus and Ascalaphus from torment.—The Hesperides, daughters of Atlas, had been entrusted by Hera with the golden apples given her by Gaea (Earth) at her wedding with Zeus. The apples were guarded by a dragon, and conferred semidivine qualities upon those who ate them.

  * This amazing “culture hero,” Diodorus thought, was a primitive engineer, a prehistoric Empedocles; the legends told about him meant that he had cleansed the springs, cleaved mountains, changed the courses of rivers, reclaimed waste areas, rid the woods of dangerous beasts, and made Greece a habitable land.11 In another aspect Heracles is the beloved son of god who suffers for mankind, raises the dead to life, descends into Hades, and then ascends into heaven.

  * “When a smith tempers in cold water a great ax or an adze, it gives off a hissing; this is what gives iron its strength.”28

  * “Then Alcinous ordered Halias and Laodamas to dance, by themselves, for never did any one dare join himself with them. They took in their hands the fine
ball, purple-dyed . . . and played. The first, bending his body right back, would hurl the ball towards the shadowy crowds, while the other in his turn would spring high into the air and catch it gracefully before his feet touched the ground. Then, after they had made full trial of tossing the ball high, they began passing it back and forth between them, all the while they danced upon the fruitful earth.”45

  * There are vestiges of an earlier and “matriarchal” condition: before Cecrops, said Athenian tradition, “children did not know their own father”—i.e., presumably, descent was reckoned through the mother; and even in Homeric days many of the gods especially worshiped by Greek cities were goddesses—Hera at Argos, Athena at Athens, Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis—with no visible subordination to any male deity.54

  † Theseus had so many wives that an historian drew up a learned catalogue of them.55

  * Argos dies of joy on recognizing his master after twenty years’ separation.

  * Helen, it need hardly be said, was the daughter of Zeus, who, in the form of a swan, seduced Leda, wife of Sparta’s King Tyndareus.

  * Parenthetical numbers indicate books of the Iliad.

  * Very probably the narrative in this instance has less basis in history than the Iliad. The legend of the long-wandering mariner or warrior, whose wife cannot recognize him on his return, is apparently older than the story of Troy, and appears in almost every literature.75 Odysseus is the Sinuhe, the Sinbad, the Robinson Crusoe, the Enoch Arden of the Greeks. The geography of the poem is a mystery that still exercises leisurely minds.

  * After her death, said Greek tradition, she was worshiped as a goddess. It was a common belief in Greece that those who spoke ill of her were punished by the gods; even Homer’s blindness, it was hinted, came upon him because he had lent his song to the calumnious notion that Helen had eloped to Troy, instead of being snatched off to Egypt against her will.77

  * Sir Arthur Evans has found, in a Mycenaean tomb in Boeotia, engravings representing a young man attacking a sphinx, and a youth killing an older man and a woman. He believes that these refer to Oedipus and Orestes; and as he ascribes these engravings to ca. 1450 B.C., he argues for a date for Oedipus and Orestes some two centuries earlier than the epoch tentatively assigned to these characters in the text.80

  * A town in Austria whose iron remains have given its name to the first period of the Iron Age in Europe.

  * Or the maps inside the covers of this book.

  * Cf. the seated Chares from Miletus in the British Museum, or the Head of Cleobis by Polymedes in the museum at Delphi.

  * “To write the history of Greece at almost any period without dissipating the interest is a task of immense difficulty . . . because there is no constant unity or fixed center to which the actions and aims of the numerous states can be subordinated or related.”—Bury, Ancient Greek Historians, p. 22.

  † To avoid returning too often to the same scene, the architectural history of minor cities will be carried in these chapters (Book II) down to the death of Alexander (323).

  * These figures, of course, are conjectural, being based upon a few hints and many assumptions.

  * Alcman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides.

  † How strangely similar this is—as if one feeling united two poets across twenty-five centuries—to Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Night-Song”:

  Über alien Gipfeln

  1st Ruh,

  In allen Wipfeln

  Spürest du

  Kaum einen Hauch;

  Die vögelein schweigen im Walde.

  Warte nur, balde

  Ruhest du auch.31

  O’er all the hill-tops

  Is quiet now,

  In all the tree-tops

  Hearest thou

  Hardly a breath;

  The birds are asleep in the trees.

  Wait; soon like these

  Thou, too, shalt rest.32

  * Lycurgus, however, was believed to have forbidden the writing of his laws.

  * Gitiadas adorned a temple of Athena with excellently wrought bronze plates; Bathycles of Magnesia built the stately throne of Apollo at Amyclae; and Theodorus of Samos built for Sparta a famous town hall. After that Spartan art, even by imported artists, is hardly heard of any more.

  * So in 1789 Camille Desmoulins, from his cafe rostra, urged the Gauls to overthrow their German (Frankish) aristocracy.

  † The Diolcos was a grateful alternative to merchants who distrusted the rough waters off Cape Malea on the sea route to the western Mediterranean. The tramway was sturdy enough to carry the usual trading vessel of Greek times; indeed, Augustus transported his fleet over the Diolcos in pursuit of Antony and Cleopatra after the battle of Actium, and a Greek squadron was similarly carried over as late as A.D. 883.78 Periander planned in his day to cut the canal that now joins the two gulfs, but his engineers found it too great a task.79

  * Cf. the periodical “purges” in Communist Russia, 1935-38.

  * The ascription of this poem, and of those quoted below, to certain periods in Theognis’ life is hypothetical.

  * So all classical antiquity believed except some Boeotian literati of the second century A.D., who questioned Hesiod’s authorship.8

  * From aphros, foam. The final syllable is of uncertain derivation.

  * History knows nothing of Hesiod’s death. Legend tells how, at the age of eighty, he seduced the maiden Clymene; how her brother killed him and threw his body into the sea; and how Clymene bore as his son the lyric poet Stesichorus—who, however, was born in Sicily.22

  * Twice the Greeks waged Sacred Wars over the perquisites of Apollo’s temple: once in 595-85, when the southern Greeks put an end to the exacting of greedy tolls by the people of neighboring Cirrha from pilgrims passing to Delphi through their port; and again in 356-46, when an allied Greek army under Philip of Macedon ousted the Phocians who had captured Delphi and appropriated the temple funds. The first war led to the neutralization of Delphi and the establishment of the Pythian games; the second led to the Macedonian conquest of Greece.

  * A wild boar having devastated the fields of Calydon, Meleager, son of Calydon’s King Oeneus, organized a hunt for it, with such aides as Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Nestor, Jason, and the fair-faced, fleet-footed Atalanta. Several heroes were slain by the boar, but Atalanta shot it and Meleager killed it. Atalanta, sought by many wooers in her Arcadian home, agreed to marry any one of them that could outrun her, but those who lost were to be put to death. Hippomenes won by dropping as he ran the three golden apples of the Hesperides given him by Aphrodite; Atalanta stooped to pick them, and lost the race. Of Meleager’s secret love for Atalanta, and his tragic death, the reader may learn in Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon.

  * Hence the wise counsel of Alexander Pope’s philosophical doggerel:

  A little learning is a dangerous thing;

  Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.24

  * “Attica,” says Thucydides (i, 1), “because of the poverty of its soil, enjoyed from a very remote period freedom from faction [?] and invasion.”

  * Probably named by the Phoenicians from shalam, peace; cf. Salem.34

  † Tradition placed this event in the thirteenth century B.C.; but the union of Attica under Athens could hardly have been completed before 700, since the “Homeric” Hymn to Demeter, composed about that date, speaks of Eleusis as still having its own king.35

  ‡ A possibly legendary event attributed by tradition to 1068 B.C.

  * The mark of a gentleman then, as in the days of Roman equites, French chevaliers, and English cavaliers.

  * “Those that stole a cabbage or an apple were to suffer even as villains that committed sacrilege or murder.“—Plutarch, Solon.

  * Probably this did not apply to commercial debts in which personal servitude was not involved.56

  * For the value of Athenian coins, see below, Chap. XII, sect. III.

  † Grote and many others interpreted Pl
utarch’s statement to mean that Solon had depreciated the currency by twenty-seven per cent and had thereby given relief to landlords who, themselves debtors to others, were deprived of the mortgage returns upon which they had depended for meeting their obligations.62 Such inflation, however, would have fallen as a second blow upon those landlords who had lent sums to merchants; if it helped any class, it helped these merchants rather than the landlords or the peasants—whose mortgages had already been forgiven. Possibly Solon had no thought of debasing the currency, but wished merely to substitute, for a monetary standard that had been found convenient in trading with the Peloponnesus, another that would facilitate trade with the rich and growing markets of Ionia, where the Euboic standard was in common use.63

  * A medimnus—about one and a half bushels—was considered equivalent to one drachma in money.

  * Diogenes Laertius tells this story rather of Soli in Cilicia—the town whose preservation of old Greek speech into Alexander’s day led to the word solecism.

  * The word tyrant had come from Lydia, perhaps from the town of Tyrrha, meaning a fortress; probably it is a distant cousin to our word tower (Gk. tyrris). Apparently it was applied first to Gyges, the Lydian king.

  * One would not be surprised to learn that they represented a resentful aristocracy, like Brutus and Cassius in Rome. Brutus, too, became the hero of a revolution, after eighteen centuries had obscured his history.

  † Grandson of Cleisthenes, dictator of Sicyon.

  * A similar institution was used at Argos, Megara, and Syracuse.

  * A property qualification was placed upon the franchise in the earlier stages of American and French democracy.

  * Cf. Pater: “Perhaps the most brilliant and animating episode in the entire history of Greece—its early colonization.”1