by Will Durant
Corinth had a history stretching back to Mycenaean times; even in Homer’s day it was famous for its wealth.81 After the Dorian conquest kings ruled it, then an aristocracy dominated by the family of the Bacchiadae. But here, too, as in Argos, Sicyon, Megara, Athens, Lesbos, Miletus, Samos, Sicily, and wherever Greek trade flourished, the business class, by revolution or intrigue, captured political power; this is the real meaning of the outbreak of “tyrannies” or dictatorships in seventh-century Greece. About 655 Cypselus seized the government. Having promised Zeus the entire wealth of Corinth if he succeeded, he laid a ten per cent tax on all property each year, and gave the proceeds to the temple, until, after a decade, he has fulfilled his vow, while leaving the city as rich as before.82 His popular and intelligent rule, through thirty years, laid the basis of Corinthian prosperity.83
His ruthless son, Periander, in one of the longest dictatorships in Greek history (625-585), established order and discipline, checked exploitation, encouraged business, patronized literature and art, and made Corinth for a time the foremost city in Greece. He stimulated trade by establishing a state coinage,84 and promoted industry by lowering taxes. He solved a crisis of unemployment by undertaking great public works, and establishing colonies abroad. He protected small businessmen from the competition of large firms by limiting the number of slaves that might be employed by one man, and forbidding their further importation.85 He relieved the wealthy of their surplus gold by compelling them to contribute to a colossal golden statue as an ornament for the city; he invited the rich women of Corinth to a festival, stripped them of their costly robes and jewels, and sent them home with half their beauty nationalized. His enemies were numerous and powerful; he dared not go out without a heavy guard, and his fear and seclusion made him morose and cruel. To protect himself against revolt he acted on the cryptic advice of his fellow dictator Thrasybulus of Miletus, that he should periodically cut down the tallest ears of corn in the field.*86 His concubines preyed upon him with accusations of his wife, until in a temper he threw her downstairs; she was pregnant, and died of the shock. He burnt the concubines alive, and banished to Corcyra his son Lycophron, who so grieved for his mother that he would not speak to his father. When the Corcyreans put Lycophron to death Periander seized three hundred youths of their noblest families and sent them to King Alyattes of Lydia, that they might be made eunuchs; but the ships that bore them touched at Samos, and the Samians, braving Periander’s anger, freed them. The dictator lived to a ripe old age, and after his death was numbered by some among the Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece.87
A generation after him the Spartans overthrew the dictatorship at Corinth and set up an aristocracy—not because Sparta loved liberty, but because she favored landowners against the business classes. Nevertheless it was upon trade that the wealth of Corinth was based, helped now and then by the devotees of Aphrodite, and the Panhellenic Isthmian games. Courtesans were so numerous in the city that the Greeks often used corinthiazomai as signifying harlotry.88 It was a common matter in Corinth to dedicate to Aphrodite’s temple women who served her as prostitutes, and brought their fees to the priests. One Xenophon (not the leader of the Ten Thousand) promises the goddess fifty hetairai, or courtesans, if she will help him to victory in the Olympic games; and the pious Pindar, celebrating this triumph, refers to the vow without flinching.89 “The Temple of Aphrodite,” says Strabo,90 “was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely squandered their money here.” The city was grateful, and looked upon these “hospitable ladies” as public benefactors. “It is an ancient custom at Corinth,” says an early author quoted by Athenaeus,91 “whenever the city addresses any supplication to Aphrodite . . . to employ as many courtesans as possible to join in the supplication.” The courtesans had a religious festival of their own, the Aphrodisia, which they celebrated with piety and pomp.92 St. Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians,93 denounced these women, who still in his time plied there their ancient trade.
In 480 Corinth had a population of fifty thousand citizens and sixty thousand slaves—an unusually high proportion of freemen to slaves.94 The quest for pleasure and gold absorbed all classes, and left little energy for literature and art. We hear of a poet Eumelus in the eighth century, but Corinthian names seldom grace Greek letters. Periander welcomed poets at his court, and brought Arion from Lesbos to organize music in Corinth. In the eighth century the pottery and bronzes of Corinth were famous; in the sixth her vase painters were at the top of their profession in Greece. Pausanias tells of a great cedar chest, in which Cypselus hid from the Bacchiadae, and upon which artists carved elegant reliefs, with inlays of ivory and gold.95 Probably it was in the age of Periander that Corinth raised to Apollo a Doric temple famous for its seven monolithic columns, five of which still stand to suggest that Corinth may have loved beauty in more forms than one. Perhaps time and chance were ungrateful to the city, and her annals fell to be written by men of other loyalties. The past would be startled if it could see itself in the pages of historians.
VI. MEGARA
Megara loved gold as much as Corinth did, and like her thrived on commerce; it had, however, a great poet, in whose verses the ancient city lives as if its revolutions were one with our own. Standing at the very entrance to the Peloponnesus, with a port on either gulf, it was in a position to bargain with armies and levy tolls upon trade; to which it added a busy textile industry manned with men and women who, in the honest phraseology of the day, were called slaves. The city flourished best in the seventh and sixth centuries, when it disputed the commerce of the isthmus with Corinth; it was then that it sent out, as trading posts, colonies as far-flung as Byzantium on the Bosporus and Megara Hyblaea in Sicily. Wealth mounted, but the clever gathered it so narrowly into their hands that the mass of the people, destitute serfs amid plenty,96 listened readily to men who promised them a better life. About 630 Theagenes, having decided to become dictator, praised the poor and denounced the rich, led a starving mob into the pastures of the wealthy breeders, had himself voted a bodyguard, increased it, and with it overthrew the government.97 For a generation Theagenes ruled Megara, freed the serfs, humbled the mighty, and patronized the arts. Towards 600 the rich deposed him in turn; but a third revolution restored the democracy, which confiscated the property of leading aristocrats, commandeered rich homes, abolished debts, and passed a decree requiring the wealthy to refund the interest that had been paid them by their debtors.98
Theognis lived through these revolutions, and described them in bitter poems that might be the voice of our class war today. He was, he tells us (for he is our sole authority on this subject), a member of an ancient and noble family. He must have grown up in comfortable circumstances, for he was guide, philosopher, and lover to a youth named Cyrnus, who became one of the leaders of the aristocratic party. He gives Cyrnus much advice, and asks merely love in return. Like all lovers he complains of short measure, and his finest extant poem reminds Cyrnus that he will achieve immortality only through Theognis’ poetry:
Lo, I have given thee wings wherewith to fly
Over the boundless ocean and the earth;
Yea, on the lips of many shalt thou lie,
The comrade of their banquet and their mirth.
Youths in their loveliness shall bid thee sound
Upon the silver flute’s melodious breath;
And when thou goest darkling underground
Down to the lamentable house of death,
Oh, yet not then from honor shalt thou cease,
But wander, an imperishable name,
Cyrnus, about the seas and shores of Greece,
Crossing from isle to isle the barren main.
Horses thou shalt not need, but lightly ride,
Sped by the Muses of the violet crown,
And men to come, while earth and sun abide,
Who cherish song shall cherish thy renown.
Yea, I have given thee wings, and in return
Thou givest me the scorn with which I burn.99
He warns Cyrnus that the injustices of the aristocracy may provoke a revolution:
Our state is pregnant, shortly to produce
A rude avenger of prolonged abuse.
The commons hitherto seem sober-minded,
But their superiors are corrupt and blinded.
The rule of noble spirits, brave and high,
Never endangered peace and harmony.
The supercilious, arrogant pretense
Of feeble minds, weakness and insolence;
Justice and truth and law wrested aside
By crafty shifts of avarice and pride;
These are our ruin, Cyrnus!—never dream
(Tranquil and undisturbed as it may seem)
Of future peace or safety to the state;
Bloodshed and strife will follow soon or late.*100
The revolution came; Theognis was among the men exiled by the triumphant democracy, and his property was confiscated. He left his wife and children with friends, and wandered from state to state—Euboea, Thebes, Sparta, Sicily; at first welcomed and fed for his poetry, then lapsing into a bitter and unaccustomed poverty. Out of his resentment he addresses to Zeus the questions which Job would ask of Yahweh:
Blessed, almighty Jove! with deep amaze
I view the world, and marvel at thy ways. . . .
How can you reconcile it to your sense
Of right and wrong, thus loosely to dispense
Your bounties on the wicked and the good?
How can your laws be known or understood?101
He becomes bitter against the leaders of the democracy, and prays to this inscrutable Zeus for the boon of drinking their blood.102 In the first known use of this metaphor he likens the state of Megara to a ship whose pilot has been replaced by disorderly and unskilled mariners.103 He argues that some men are by nature abler than others, and that therefore aristocracy in some form is inevitable; already men had discovered that majorities never rule. He uses hoi agathoi, the good, as synonymous with the aristocrats, and hoi kakoi, the bad, base, worthless, as signifying the common people.104 These native differences, he thinks, are ineradicable; “no amount of teaching will make a bad man good,”105—though he may merely mean here that no training can turn a commoner into an aristocrat. Like all good conservatives he is strong for eugenics: the evils of the world are due not to the greed of the “good” but to their misalliances and their infertility.106
He plots with Cyrnus another counterrevolution; he argues that even if one has taken a vow of loyalty to the new government it is permissible to assassinate a tyrant; and he pledges himself to work with his friends until they have taken full vengeance upon their foes. Nevertheless, after many years of exile and loneliness, he bribes an official to let him return to Megara.107 He is revolted at his own duplicity, and writes lines of despair that hundreds of Greeks would quote:
Not to be born, never to see the sun—
No worldly blessing is a greater one!
And the next best is speedily to die,
And lapt beneath a load of earth to lie.108
In the end we find him back in Megara, old and broken, and promising, for safety’s sake, never again to write of politics. He consoles himself with wine and a loyal wife,109 and does his best to learn at last the lesson that everything natural is forgivable.
Learn, Cyrnus, learn to bear an easy mind;
Accommodate your humor to mankind
And human nature; take it as you find.
A mixture of ingredients good and bad—
Such are we all, the best that can be had.
The best are found defective, and the rest,
For common use, are equal to the best.
Suppose it had been otherwise decreed,
How could the business of the world proceed?110
VII. AEGINA AND EPIDAURUS
Across the bay from Megara and Corinth earthquake had raised, or left, one of their earliest rivals in industry and trade—the island of Aegina. There, in Mycenaean times, a prosperous city developed, whose graves gave up much gold.111 The conquering Dorians found the land too barren for tillage, but admirably placed for commerce. When the Persians came the island knew only an aristocracy of tradesmen, eager to sell the excellent vases and bronzes produced in their shops for the slaves whom they imported in great number to work in their factories, or for sale to the cities of Greece. Aristotle, about 350, calculated that Aegina had a population of half a million, of whom 470,000 were slaves.112 Here the first Greek coins were made, and the Aeginetan weights and measures remained standard in Greece till its conquest by Rome.
That such a commercial community could graduate from wealth to art was revealed when, in 1811, a traveler discovered in a heap of rubbish the vigorous and finely carved figures that once adorned the pediment of the temple of Aphaea. Of the temple itself twenty-two Doric columns stand, still bearing their architrave. Probably the Aeginetans built it shortly before the Persian War; for though its architecture is classic, its statuary shows many traces of the archaic, semi-Oriental style. Possibly, however, it was raised after Salamis; for the statuary, which represents Aeginetans overcoming Trojans, may symbolize the perennial conflict between Greece and the Orient, and the recent victory won by the Greek fleet under the very brows of Aegina at Salamis. To that fleet the little island contributed thirty ships; and one of these, after the victory, was awarded by the Greeks the first prize for bravery.
A pleasant boat ride takes the traveler from Aegina to Epidaurus, now a village of five hundred souls, but once among the most famous cities of Greece. For here—or rather ten miles out in a narrow gorge among the loftiest mountains of the Argolic peninsula—was the chief home of Asclepius, the hero-god of healing. “O Asclepius!” Apollo himself had said through his oracle at Delphi, “thou who art born a great joy to all mortals, whom lovely Coronis bare to me, the child of love, at rocky Epidaurus.”113 Asclepius cured so many people—even raising a man from the dead—that Pluto, god of Hades, complained to Zeus that hardly anyone was dying any more; and Zeus, who would hardly know what to do with the human race if it were not for death, destroyed Asclepius with a thunderbolt.114 But the people, first in Thessaly, then in Greece, worshiped him as a savior god. At Epidaurus they raised to him the greatest of his temples, and there the physician-priests who from him were called Asclepiads established a sanitarium known throughout Hellas for its success in treating disease. Epidaurus became a Greek Lourdes; pilgrims flocked to it from every part of the Mediterranean world, seeking what to the Greeks seemed the greatest boon of all—health. They slept in the temple, submitted hopefully to the regimen prescribed, and recorded their cures, which they believed to be miraculous, on stone tablets that still lie here and there among the ruins of the sacred grove. It was out of the fees and gifts of these patients that Epidaurus built its theater, and the stadium whose seats and goals still lie in the lap of the neighboring hills, and the lovely tholos—a circular, colonnaded building whose surviving fragments, preserved in the little museum, are among the most exquisitely carved marbles in Greece. Today such patients go to Tenos in the Cyclades, where the priests of the Greek Church heal them115 as those of Asclepius healed their forerunners two thousand five hundred years ago. And the gloomy peak where once the people of Epidaurus sacrificed to Zeus and Hera is now the sacred mount of St. Elias. The gods are mortal, but piety is everlasting.
What the student looks for most eagerly at Epidaurus is not the leveled ruins of the Asclepium. The land is well wooded here, and he does not see the perfect theater that he is seeking until a turn in the road spreads it out against the mountainside in a gigantic fan of stone. Polycleitus the Younger built it in the fourth century before our era, but even to this day it is almost completely preserved. As the traveler
stands in the center of the orchestra, or dancing place—a spacious circle paved with stone—and sees before him fourteen thousand seats in rising tiers, so admirably designed that every seat directly faces him; as his glance follows the radiating aisles that rise in swift straight lines from the stage to the trees of the mountain slope above; as he speaks quietly to his friends on the farthest, highest seats, two hundred feet away, and perceives that his every word is understood: then he visions Epidaurus in the days of its prosperity, sees in his mind’s eye the crowds coming out in gay freedom from shrine and city to hear Euripides, and feels, more than he can ever express, the vibrant, plein-air life of ancient Greece.
CHAPTER V
Athens
I. HESIOD’S BOEOTIA
EAST of Megara the road divides—south to Athens, north to Thebes. Northward the route is mountainous, and draws the traveler up to the heights of Mt. Cithaeron. Far to the west Parnassus is visible. Ahead, across lesser heights and far below, is the fertile Boeotian plain. At the foot of the hill lies Plataea, where 100,000 Greeks annihilated 300,000 Persians. A little to the west is Leuctra, where Epaminondas won his first great victory over the Spartans. Again a little west rises Mt. Helicon, home of the Muses and Keats’s “blushful Hippocrene”—that famous fountain, the Horse’s Spring, which, we are assured, gushed forth when the hoof of the winged steed Pegasus struck the earth as he leaped toward heaven.1 Directly north is Thespiae, always at odds with Thebes; and close by is the fountain in whose waters Narcissus contemplated his shadow—or, another story said, that of the dead sister whom he loved.2