by Will Durant
* Semonides compares women now to foxes, asses, pigs, and the changeful sea, and swears that no husband has ever passed through a day without some word of censure from his wife.13
* Longfellow’s Evangeline, his Hiawatha, and the final line of each stanza in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, by Byron, may serve as examples respectively of dactylic hexameter, trochaic tetrameter, and iambic trimeter.
* Or, as we know it, from the Roman name of the goddess and the Italian name of the island, the Venus de Milo.
† Cf. Case XIII of the Cesnola Collection of Cyprian Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A bilingual tablet unearthed by British scholars in 1868 enabled them to decipher Cypriote writing as a dialect of Greek expressed by syllabic signs; but the results have not added anything of interest to universal history.
* Similar movements, however, appeared in India and China in this sixth century B.C.
* Let Aristotle tell the story: “They say that Thales, perceiving by his skill in astrology (astronomy) that there would be great plenty of olives that year, while it was yet winter hired at a low price all the oil presses in Miletus and Chios, there being no one to bid against him. But when the season came for making oil, many persons wanting them, he all at once let them upon what terms he pleased; and raising a large sum of money by that means, convinced them that it was easy for philosophers to be rich if they chose it.”23
* That a circle is bisected by its diameter; that the angles at the base of any isosceles triangle are “similar” (i.e., equal); that the angle in a semicircle is a right angle; that the opposite angles formed by two intersecting straight lines are equal; that two triangles having two angles and one side respectively equal are themselves equal.24
* Cf. Spencer’s definition of evolution as substantially a change from “indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity.”33
* The ecliptic (so called because eclipses of the sun and moon take place in it) is the great circle made by the apparent annual path of the sun through the heavens. Since the plane of this circle or ecliptic is also the plane of the earth’s orbit, the obliquity of the ecliptic is the oblique angle (about 23°) between the plane of the earth’s equator and the plane of its orbit around the sun.
† The Egyptians had drawn maps, but of limited districts.
‡ The wise reader will always supply the word known after such words as earliest and first.
* From histor or istor, knowing; a euphonism for id-tor, from the root id in eidenai, to know; cf. our wit and wisdom. Story is a shortened form of history.
* Similar enterprises today make both ends meet with an error of only a few inches, or none.
* The other six were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Pharos at Alexandria, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Pheidian Zeus at Olympia, the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, and the Pyramids. Pliny describes the second temple as 425 feet long by 225 feet wide, with 127 columns sixty feet in height—several of them adorned or disfigured with reliefs.50 Completed in 420 B.C. after more than a century of labor, it was destroyed by fire in 356.
* The parenthetical numbers refer to the fragments of Heracleitus as numbered by Bywater.
* Possibly Heracleitus had in mind a nebular hypothesis: the world begins as fire (or heat or energy), it becomes gas or moisture, which is precipitated as water, whose chemical residue, after evaporation, forms the solids of the earth.55 Water and earth (liquid and solid) are two stages of one process, two forms of one reality (25). “All things are exchanged for Fire, and Fire for all things” (22). All change is a “pathway down or up,” a passage from one to another form—now more, now less, condensed—of energy or Fire. “The path upwards and downwards is one and the same” (69); rarefaction and condensation are movements in an eternal oscillation of change; all things are formed on the downward and condensing or on the upward and rarefying pathway of reality from Fire and back to Fire; all forms are modes of one underlying energy. In Spinoza’s language: Fire or energy is the eternal and omnipresent substance, or basic principle; condensation and rarefaction (the downward and upward paths) are its attributes; its modes or specific forms are the visible things of the world.
* Gk. kolophon, hill; cf. Latin collis, Eng. hill. Because the cavalry of the city was famous for giving the “finishing touch” to a defeated force, the word kolophon became in Greek a synonym for the final stroke, and passed into our language as a publisher’s symbol, originally placed at the end of a book.59
* Today, under the name of Ismir (this and Smyrna are probably connected with the ancient trade in myrrh), it is the second city of Turkey in population, and the largest in Asia Minor.
* Swinburne has given us a better example of the meter, and described Sappho’s love, in a Profoundly beautiful poem called “Sapphics” (“All the night came not upon my eyelids”), in Poems and Ballads.
* Nearly all the cities mentioned in this chapter are still in existence, though under altered names.
* The name was probably taken from Byzas, a native king.96
* Watteau’s painting, Embarkation for Cythera, symbolized the spirit of the upper classes in eighteenth-century France, which had shed just enough theology to be epicurean.
* The traditional dates for the founding of the Greek cities in the West are given in the Chronological Table. These dates were taken by Thucydides from the old logographer Antiochus of Syracuse; they are highly uncertain, and Mahaffy believed that the Sicilian foundations came later than those in Italy. Thucydides’ chronology, however, has still many supporters.7
† Cooks or confectioners who invented new dishes or sweets—Athenaeus reports—were allowed to patent them for a year.10 Perhaps Athenaeus mistook caricature for history.
* The name given by the Romans to the Greek cities in southern Italy.
* Cf. Chap. IX, sect, IV, below.
* The Pythagoreans appear to have been the first to use the word mathematike with the meaning of mathematics; before them it had been applied to the learning (mathema) of anything.30
* In the fragment “On the Improvement of the Intellect.”
† Science tries to reduce all phenomena to quantitative, mathematical, Verifiable statements; chemistry describes all things in terms of symbols and figures, arranges the elements mathematically in a periodic law, and reduces them to an intra-atomic arithmetic of electrons; astronomy becomes celestial mathematics, and physicists seek a mathematical formula to cover the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and gravitation; some thinkers of our time have tried to express philosophy itself in mathematical form.
‡ We should note, in passing, that Pythagoras, slightly anticipating Pasteur, denied spontaneous generation, and taught that all animals are born from other animals through “seeds.”41
* The Greeks were so fond of this fable that they told it also of the laws of Catana and Thurii. The plan was especially pleasing to Michel de Montaigne, and may not have outlived its utility.
* Or perhaps a generation later; cf. note to p. 160 above.
* He cast his warning into the form of a fable. A horse, annoyed by the invasion of a stag into its pasturage, asked a man to help it punish the poacher. The man promised to do this if the horse would allow him to bestride it javelin in hand. The horse agreed, the stag was frightened away, and the horse found that he was now a slave to the man.
* “Gelon of Syracuse,” says Lucian, “had disagreeable breath, but did not find it out himself for a long time, no one venturing to mention such a circumstance to a tyrant. At last a foreign woman who had a connection with him dared to tell him; whereupon he went to his wife and scolded her for never having, with all her opportunities of knowing, warned him of it; she put in the defense that as she had never been familiar or at close quarters with any other man, she had supposed all men were like that.”66 He was disarmed.
* Phaëthon (the Brilliant), son of Helios, begged for the thrill of driving the sun’s chariot across the heavens. He drove it reckles
sly, nearly set the world on fire, was struck by lightning, and fell into the sea. Perhaps the Greeks meant this tale, like that of Icarus, to serve as a sermon to youth.
* Note the absence of mother goddesses in such strongly patriarchal societies as Judea, Islam, and Protestant Christendom.
* Plutus, god of wealth, was a form of Pluto. In early Greece wealth took chiefly the form of corn either growing in the earth or stored in the earth in jars, in either case under Pluto’s protection.20
* This struggle between Zeus and his aides against the Titans became for the Greeks a symbol of the conquest of barbarism and brute strength by civilization and reason, and offered a frequent subject for art.
† The name Zeus is probably akin to the Latin dies, our day, and may come from an Indo-European root di meaning to shine. Jupiter is Zeu-pater, Zeus the father; hence the genitive Dios. Today the haunts and peaks once sacred to Zeus are named, or dedicated to, St. Elias, the rain-giving saint of the Greek Church.25
* It should be added, in justice to the dead, that these adventures were probably invented by the poets, or by tribes anxious to trace their lineage to the greatest of the gods.
† From Phoebe he took the name Phoebus, “inspired.”
* The myth of Adonis is one more variation on the vegetation theme—the annual death and resurrection of the soil. This handsome youth was desired by both Aphrodite and Persephone, the goddesses of love and of death. Ares, jealous of Adonis’ success with Aphrodite, disguised himself as a wild boar and killed him. The anemone was born of Adonis’ blood, and rivers of poetry from Aphrodite’s grief. Zeus persuaded the goddesses to divide Adonis’ time and attentions by leaving him for half a year with Persephone in Hades, and restoring him for half a year to earthly life and love. In Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Athens the death of the boy was commemorated in the festival of the Adonia; women carried images of the Lord (for such was the meaning of his name), loudly bewailed his death, and triumphantly celebrated his resurrection.38
* Diodorus Siculus, as early as 50 B.C., interpreted the tale as a vegetation myth. Zagreus, the vine, is a child of Demeter, the earth, fertilized by Zeus, the rain. The vine, like the god, is cut (pruned) to give it new life; and the juice of the grape is boiled to make wine. Each year, under nourishing rains, the vine is reborn.41 Herodotus found so many resemblances between the myths of Dionysus and Osiris that he identified the two gods in one of the first essays in comparative religion.42
† From entheos, “a god within”; “enthusiasm” originally meant possession by a god.
* These victims in Athens were called pharmakoi, which meant originally magicians; pharmakon meant a magic spell or formula, then a healing drug.66 The question whether the pharmakoi were really slain is in dispute; but there is little doubt that the sacrifice was originally literal.67
* In many parts of Europe the people still believe that the ghosts of the dead return to earth yearly, and must be entertained in a “Feast of All Souls.”96
* Cf. in addition to numerals and family terms, such words as Sanskrit dam (as) (house), Greek domos. Latin domus, English tim-ber; dvaras, thyra, fores, door; venas, (f)oinos, vinum, wine; naus, naus, navis, nave; akshas, axon, axis, axle; iugam, zygon, iugum, yoke, etc.
* We do not know how ancient Greek was pronounced.2 The accents that trouble us so much were seldom used by the classical Greeks, but were inserted into ancient texts by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the third century B.C. These accents should be ignored in reading Greek poetry.
† Cf. Greek alpha, Phoenician aleph (bull); beta, beth (tent); gamma, gimel (camel); delta, daleth (door); e-psilon, he (window); zeta, zain (lance); beta, kheth (paling); iota, yod (hand), etc.
* Graphein, which we translate to write, originally meant to engrave.
† The Latins called a roll volumen—wound up.
‡ Latin frontes, whence our frontispiece.
§ Though we have been eye-minded since the development of printing, and writing is seldom read aloud, style and punctuation are still formed with a view to easy breathing in the reader, and a rhythmic sound in the words. Probably our descendants will be ear-minded again.
* Rhyme was mostly confined to oracles and religious prophecies.
† From raptein, to stitch together, and oide, a song.
* So called because they were found chiefly near the Double Gate of the city at the Ceramicas.
* No. 682 in the National Museum at Athens.
† Now in the British Museum; there are copies in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Branchidae were the hereditary priests of the temple.
* A scale employing quarter tones; e.g., E E’ F A B B’ C E-where the accent indicates a quarter tone above the preceding note.
* The music of Hellas was played in a variety of scales far more numerous and complex than ours. Our diatonic scale makes no smaller division than the half tone, and twelve half tones constitute our octave; the Greeks used quarter tones, and had forty-five scales of eighteen notes apiece.73 These scales were in three groups: the diatonic scales, based upon the tetrachord E D C B; the chromatic, upon E C# C B; and the enharmonic, upon E C Cb B. From the Greek scales, by simplification, came those of medieval church music, and, through these, our own.
Within the diatonic tetrachord seven modes (harmoniai) were produced by tuning the strings to alter the position of the semitones in the octave. The most important modes were the Dorian (E F G A B C D E), martial and grave though in a minor key; the Lydian (C D E F G A B C), tender and plaintive though in a major key; and the Phrygian (D E F G A B C D), minor in key, and orgiastically passionate and wild.74 It is amusing to read of the violent controversies concerning the musical, ethical, and medical effects, restorative or disastrous, which the Greeks—chiefly the philosophers—ascribed to these half-tone variations. Dorian music, we are told, made men brave and dignified, the Lydian made them sentimental and weak, the Phrygian made them excited and headstrong. Plato saw effeminate luxury and gross immorality as the offspring of most music, and wished to banish all instrumental performances from his ideal state. Aristotle would have had all youths trained in the Dorian mode.75 Theophrastus had a good word to say even for the Phrygian mode; serious diseases, he tells us, can be made painless by playing a Phrygian air near the affected part.76
Greek musical notation used not ovals and stems on a staff of lines, but the letters of the alphabet, varied by inversion or transversion, augmented by dots and dashes to make sixtyfour signs, and placed above the words of the song. A few scraps of such notation have come down to console us for the loss of the rest; they indicate melodies akin rather to Oriental than to European strains, and would be more bearable to the Hindus, the Chinese, or the Japanese than to our dull Occidental ears, untrained to quarter tones.
* The word foot, as meaning part of a verse, owes its origin to the dance that accompanied the song;79 orchestra, to the Greek, meant a dancing platform, usually in front of the stage.
* These figures from Herodotus31 are presumably an outburst of patriotic imagination. Plutarch, trying to be impartial, raises the Greek loss to 1360, and Diodorus Siculus, though always generous with numbers, lowers the Persian loss to 100,000;32 but even Plutarch and Diodorus were Greeks.
* A river in Pamphylia, in southern Asia Minor.
* Grote’s statement, written about 1850, of the case against the Areopagus recalls certain criticisms of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1937. “The Areopagus, standing alone in the enjoyment of a life-tenure, appears to have exercised an undefined and extensive control which long continuance had gradually consecrated. It was invested with a kind of religious respect. . . . The Areopagus also exercised a supervision over the public assembly, taking care that none of the proceedings . . . should be such as to infringe the established laws of the country. These were powers immense, undefined, not derived from any formal grant of the people.”6
* Deianira, wife of Heracles, caused his death by presenting him with a poisoned robe. Cf. So
phocles’ Trachinian Women.
* The Greek word, metoikoi, means “sharing the home.”
† The figures are from Gomme, A. W., The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C., pp. 21, 26, 47. They are frankly conjectural. The total figure includes the wives and minor children of the citizens.
* I.e., what is laid down, from ti-themi, I place; cf. our doom in its early sense of law, and the Russian duma.
* In Periclean Athens the name thesmothetai was given to the six minor archons who recorded, interpreted, and enforced the laws; in Aristotle’s day they presided over the popular courts.
* Strictly, heliaea is the name of the place where the courts met, and was so called (from helios, sun) because the sessions were held in the open air.
* Crito, rich friend of Socrates, complained that it was difficult for one who wished to mind his own business to live at Athens. “For at this very time,” he said, “there are people bringing actions against me, not because they have suffered any wrongs from me, but because they think that I would rather pay them a sum of money than have the trouble of law proceedings.”45
* The word is cousin to the Sanskrit barbara and the Latin balbus, both of which mean stammering; cf. our babble. The Greeks implied by barbaros rather strangeness of speech than lack of civilization, and used barbarismos precisely as we, following them, use barbarism-to mean an alien or quasi-alien distortion of a nation’s idiom.
* In this volume an obol is reckoned as equivalent in buying power to 17 cents in United States currency in 1938, a drachma as $1, a talent as $6000. These equivalents are only approximate, for prices rose throughout Greek history; cf. section V of this chapter.
* Plutarch, Pericles. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, 272, and Ferguson, Greek Imperialism, 61, feel that the Athenian disdain for manual labor has been exaggerated; but cf. Glotz, Ancient Greece at Work 160.
