The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  Once the child is so accepted into the family it cannot lawfully be exposed, and is reared with all the affection that parents lavish upon their children in every age. Themistocles describes his son as the real ruler of Athens; for he, Themistocles, the most influential man in the city, is ruled by his wife, who is ruled by their child.6 Many an epigram in The Greek Anthology reveals a tender parental love:

  I wept at the death of my Theonoe, but the hopes centered in our child lightened my sorrows. And now envious Fate has bereaved me of the boy as well. Alas! I am cheated of thee, my child, all that was left to me. Persephone, hear this cry of a father’s grief, and lay the child upon his dead mother’s breast.7

  The tragedies of adolescence are eased with many games, some of which will survive the memory of Greece. On a white perfume vase made for a child’s grave a little boy is seen taking his toy cart with him down to Hades.8 Babies have terra-cotta rattles containing pebbles; girls keep house with their dolls, boys fight great campaigns with clay soldiers and generals, nurses push children on swings or balance them on seesaws, boys and girls roll hoops, fly kites, spin tops, play hide-and-seek or blindman’s buff or tug of war, and wage a hundred merry contests with pebbles, nuts, coins, and balls. The marbles of the Golden Age are dried beans shot from the fingers, or smooth stones shot or tossed into a circle to dislodge enemy stones and come to rest as near as possible to the center. As children approach the “age of reason”—seven or eight—they take up the game of dice by throwing square knucklebones (astragali), the highest throw, six, being counted the best.9 The games of the young are as old as the sins of their fathers.

  II. EDUCATION

  Athens provides public gymnasiums and palaestras, and exercises some loose supervision over teachers; but the city has no public schools or state universities, and education remains in private hands. Plato advocates state schools,10 but Athens seems to believe that even in education competition will produce the best results. Professional schoolmasters set up their own schools, to which freeborn boys are sent at the age of six. The name paidagogos is given not to the teacher but to the slave who conducts the boy daily to and from school; we hear of no boarding schools. Attendance at school continues till fourteen or sixteen, or till a later age among the well to do.11 The schools have no desks but only benches; the pupil holds on his knee the roll from which he reads or the material upon which he writes. Some schools, anticipating much later fashions, are adorned with statues of Greek heroes and gods; a few are elegantly furnished. The teacher teaches all subjects, and attends to character as well as intellect, using a sandal.*12

  The curriculum has three divisions—writing, music, and gymnastics; eager modernists will add, in Aristotle’s day, drawing and painting.14 Writing includes reading and arithmetic, which uses letters for numbers. Everyone learns to play the lyre, and much of the material of instruction is put into poetical and musical form.15 No time is spent in acquiring any foreign language, much less a dead one, but great care is taken in learning the correct usage of the mother tongue. Gymnastics are taught chiefly in the gymnasium and the palaestra, and no one is considered educated who has not learned to wrestle, swim, and use the bow and the sling.

  The education of girls is carried on at home, and is largely confined to “domestic science.” Outside of Sparta girls take no part in public gymnastics. They are taught by their mothers or nurses to read and write and reckon, to spin and weave and embroider, to dance and sing and play some instrument. A few Greek women are well educated, but these are mostly hetairai; for respectable ladies there is no secondary education, until Aspasia lures a few of them into rhetoric and philosophy. Higher education for men is provided by professional rhetors and sophists, who offer instruction in oratory, science, philosophy, and history. These independent teachers engage lecture halls near the gymnasium or palaestra, and constitute together a scattered university for pre-Platonic Athens. Only the prosperous can study under them, for they charge high fees; but ambitious youths work by night in mill or field in order to be able to attend by day the classes of these nomadic professors.

  When boys reach the age of sixteen they are expected to pay special attention to physical exercises, as fitting them in some measure for the tasks of war. Even their sports give them indirectly a military preparation: they run, leap, wrestle, hunt, drive chariots, and hurl the javelin. At eighteen they enter upon the second of the four stages of Athenian life (pais, ephebos, aner, geron—child, youth, man, elder), and are enrolled into the ranks of Athens’ soldier youth, the epheboi.† Under moderators chosen by the leaders of their tribes they are trained for two years in the duties of citizenship and war. They live and eat together, wear an impressive uniform, and submit to moral supervision night and day. They organize themselves democratically on the model of the city, meet in assembly, pass resolutions, and erect laws for their own governance; they have archons, strategoi, and judges.16 For the first year they are schooled with strenuous drill, and hear lectures on literature, music, geometry, and rhetoric.17 At nineteen they are assigned to garrison the frontier, and are entrusted for two years with the protection of the city against attack from without and disorder within. Solemnly, in the presence of the Council of Five Hundred, with hands stretched over the altar in the temple of Agraulos, they take the oath of the young men of Athens:

  I will not disgrace the sacred arms, nor will I abandon the man next to me, whoever he may be. I will bring aid to the ritual of the state, and to the holy duties, both alone and in company with many. I will transmit my native commonwealth not lessened, but larger and better than I have received it. I will obey those who from time to time are judges; I will obey the established statutes, and whatever other regulations the people shall enact. If anyone shall attempt to destroy the statutes I will not permit it, but will repel him both alone and with all. I will honor the ancestral faith.18

  The epheboi are assigned a special place at the theater, and play a prominent role in the religious processions of the city; perhaps it is such young men that we see riding so handsomely on the Parthenon frieze. Periodically they exhibit their accomplishments in public contests, above all in the relay torch race from the Piraeus to Athens. All the city comes out for this picturesque event, and lines the four-and-a-half-mile road; the race is run at night, and the way is not illuminated; all that can be seen of the runners is the leaping light of the torches that they carry forward and pass on. When, at the age of twenty-one, the training of the epheboi is completed, they are freed from parental authority, and formally admitted into the full citizenship of the city.

  Such is the education—eked out by lessons learned in the home and in the street—that produces the Athenian citizen. It is an excellent combination of physical and mental, moral and esthetic, training, of supervision in youth with freedom in maturity; and in its heyday it turns out young men as fine as any in history. After Pericles theory grows and beclouds practice; philosophers debate the goals and methods of education—whether the teacher should aim chiefly at intellectual development or at moral character, chiefly at practical ability or the promotion of abstract science. But all agree in attaching the highest importance to education. When Aristippus is asked in what way the educated are superior to the untutored he answers, “as broken horses are to the unbroken”; and Aristotle to the same question replies, “as the living are to the dead.” At least, adds Aristippus, “If the pupil derives no other good, he will not, when he attends the theater, be one stone upon another.”19

  III. EXTERNALS

  The citizens of Athens, in the fifth century, are men of medium height, vigorous, bearded, and not all as handsome as Pheidias’ horsemen. The ladies of the vases are graceful, and those of the stelae have a dignified loveliness, and those molded by the sculptors are supremely beautiful; but the actual ladies of Athens, limited in their mental development by an almost Oriental seclusion, are at best as pretty as their Near Eastern sisters, but no more. The Greeks admire beauty even beyond other nations, but t
hey do not always embody it. Greek women, like others, find their figures a little short of perfection. They lengthen them with high cork soles on their shoes, pad out deficiencies with wadding, compress abundances with lacing, and support the breasts with a cloth brassiere.*20

  The hair of the Greeks is usually dark; blondes are exceptional, and much admired; many women, and some men, dye their hair to make it blonde, or to conceal the grayness of age.22 Both sexes use oils to help the growth of the hair and to protect it against the sun; the women, and again some men, add perfumes to the oil.23 Both sexes, in the sixth century, wear the hair long, usually bound in braids around or behind the head. In the fifth century the women vary their coiffure by knotting the hair low on the nape of the neck, or letting it fall over the shoulders, or around the neck and upon the breast. The ladies like to bind their hair with gay ribbons, and to adorn these with a jewel on the forehead.24 After Marathon the men begin to cut their hair; after Alexander they will shave their mustaches and beards with sickle-shaped razors of iron. No Greek ever wears a mustache without a beard. The beard is neatly trimmed, usually to a point. The barber not only cuts the hair and shaves or trims the beard, but he manicures his customer and otherwise polishes him up for presentation; when he has finished he offers him a mirror in the most modern style.25 The barber has his shop, which is a center for the “wineless symposia” (as Theophrastus calls them) of the local gossips and gadflies; but he often works outside it under the sky. He is garrulous by profession; and when one of his kind asks King Archelaus of Macedon how he would like to have his hair cut the king answers, “In silence.”26 The women also shave here and there, using razors or depilatories of arsenic and lime.

  Perfumes—made from flowers, with a base of oil—are numbered in the hundreds; Socrates complains that men make so much use of them.27 Every lady of class has an armory of mirrors, pins, hairpins, safety pins, tweezers, combs, scent bottles, and pots for rouge and creams. Cheeks and lips are painted with sticks of minium or alkanet root; eyebrows are penciled with lampblack or pulverized antimony; eyelids are shaded with antimony or kohl; eyelashes are darkened, and then set with a mixture of egg white and gum ammoniac. Creams and washes are used for removing wrinkles, freckles, and spots; disagreeable applications are kept on the face for hours in the patient lust to seem, if one cannot be, beautiful. Oil of mastic is employed to prevent perspiration, and specific perfumed unguents are applied to various parts of the body; a proper lady uses palm oil on the face and breast, marjoram on the eyebrows and hair, essence of thyme on the throat and knees, mint on the arms, myrrh on the legs and feet.28 Against this seductive armament men protest to as much effect as in other ages. A character in Athenian comedy reproves a lady in cosmetic detail: “If you go out in summer, two streaks of black run from your eyes; perspiration makes a red furrow from your cheeks to your neck; and when your hair touches your face it is blanched by the white lead.”29 Women remain the same, because men do.

  Water is limited, and cleanliness seeks substitutes. The well to do bathe once or twice daily, using a soap made of olive oil mixed with an alkali into a paste; then they are anointed with fragrant essences. Comfortable homes have a paved bathroom in which stands a large marble basin, usually filled by hand; sometimes water is brought by pipes and channels into the house and through the wall of the bathroom, where it spouts from a metal nozzle in the shape of an animal’s head, and falls upon the floor of a small shower-bath enclosure, whence it runs out into the garden.30 Most people, unable to spare water for a bath, rub themselves with oil, and then scrape it off with a crescent-shaped strigil, as in Lysippus’ Apoxyomenos. The Greek is not fastidiously clean; his hygiene is not so much a matter of indoor toilette as of abstemious diet and an active outdoor life. He seldom sits in closed homes, theaters, churches, or halls, rarely works in closed factories or shops; his drama, his worship, even his government, proceed under the sun; and his simple clothing, which lets the air reach every part of his body, can be thrown aside with one swing of the arm for a bout of wrestling or a bath of sunshine.

  Greek dress consists essentially of two squares of cloth, loosely draped about the body, and seldom tailored to fit the individual; it varies in minor detail from city to city, but remains constant for generations. The chief garment at Athens is for men the chiton, or tunic, for women the peplos, or robe, both made of wool. If the weather requires it these may be covered with a mantle (himation) or cloak (chlamys), suspended like them from the shoulders, and falling freely in those natural folds that so please us in Greek statuary. In the fifth century clothing is usually white; women, rich men, and gay youths, however, go in for color, even for purple and dark red, and colored stripes and embroidered hems; and the women may bind a colored girdle about the waist. Hats are unpopular on the ground that they keep moisture from the hair and so make it prematurely gray;31 the head is covered only in traveling, in battle, and at work under the hot sun; women may wear colored kerchiefs or bandeaux; workers sometimes wear a cap and nothing else.32 Shoes are sandals, high shoes, or boots; usually of leather, black for men, colored for women. The ladies of Thebes, says Dicaearchus, “wear low purple shoes laced so as to show the bare feet.”33 Most children and workingmen dispense with shoes altogether; and no one bothers with stockings.34

  Both sexes announce or disguise their incomes with jewelry. Men wear at least one ring; Aristotle wears several.35 The walking sticks of the men may have knobs of silver or gold. Women wear bracelets, necklaces, diadems, earrings, brooches and chains, jeweled clasps and buckles, and sometimes jeweled bands about the ankles or the upper arms. Here, as in most mercantile cultures, luxury runs into excess among those to whom wealth is a novelty. Sparta regulates the headdress of its ladies, and Athens forbids women to take more than three dresses on a journey.36 Women smile at these restrictions, and, without lawyers, get around them; they know that to most men and to some women dress makes the woman; and their behavior in this matter reveals a wisdom gathered through a thousand centuries.

  IV. MORALS

  The Athenians of the fifth century are not exemplars of morality; the progress of the intellect has loosened many of them from their ethical traditions, and has turned them into almost unmoral individuals. They have a high reputation for legal justice, but they are seldom altruistic to any but their children; conscience rarely troubles them, and they never dream of loving their neighbors as themselves. Manners vary from class to class; in the dialogues of Plato life is graced with a charming courtesy, but in the comedies of Aristophanes there are no manners at all, and in public oratory personal abuse is relied upon as the very soul of eloquence; in such matters the Greeks have much to learn from the time-polished “barbarians” of Egypt or Persia or Babylon. Salutation is cordial but simple; there is no bowing, for that seems to the proud citizens a vestige of monarchy; handshaking is reserved for oaths or solemn farewells; usually the greeting is merely Chaire—“Rejoice”—followed, as elsewhere, by some brilliant remark about the weather.37

  Hospitality has lessened since Homeric days, for travel is a little more secure than then, and inns provide food and shelter for transients; even so it remains an outstanding virtue of the Athenians. Strangers are welcomed though without introduction; if they come with letters from a common friend, they receive bed and board, and sometimes parting gifts. An invited guest is always privileged to bring an uninvited guest with him. This freedom of entry gives rise in time to a class of parasites—parasitoi—a word originally applied to the clergy who ate the “corn left over” from the temple supplies. The well to do are generous givers in both public and private philanthropy; the practice as well as the word is Greek. Charity—charitas, or love—is also present; there are many institutions for the care of strangers, the sick, the poor, and the old.38 The government provides pensions for wounded soldiers, and brings up war orphans at the expense of the state; in the fourth century it will make payments to disabled workmen.39 In periods of drought, war, or other crisis, the state pays two
obols (34 cents) a day to the needy, in addition to the regular fees for attendance at the Assembly, the courts, and the plays. There are the normal scandals; a speech of Lysias concerns a man who, though on public relief, has rich men for his friends, earns money by his handicraft, and rides horses for recreation.40

  The Greek might admit that honesty is the best policy, but he tries everything else first. The chorus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes expresses the tenderest sympathy for the wounded and deserted soldier, and then takes advantage of his slumber to counsel Neoptolemus to betray him, steal his weapons, and leave him to his fate. Everyone complains that the Athenian retailers adulterate their goods, give short weight and short change despite the government inspectors, shift the fulcrum of their scales towards the measuring weights,40a and lie at every opportunity; the sausages, for example, are accused of being dogs.41 A comic dramatist calls the fishmongers “assassins”; a gentler poet calls them “burglars.”42 The politicians are not much better; there is hardly a man in Athenian public life that is not charged with crookedness;43 an honest man like Aristides is considered exciting news, almost a monstrosity; even Diogenes’ daytime lantern does not find another. Thucydides reports that men are more anxious to be called clever than honest, and suspect honesty of simplicity.44 It is an easy matter to find Greeks who will betray their country: “At no time,” says Pausanias, “was Greece wanting in people afflicted with this itch for treason.”45 Bribery is a popular way to political advancement, criminal impunity, diplomatic accomplishments; Pericles has large sums voted to him for secret uses, presumably for lubricating international negotiations. Morality is strictly tribal; Xenophon, in a treatise on education, frankly advises lying and robbery in dealing with the enemies of one’s country.46 The Athenian envoys at Sparta in 432 defend their empire in plain terms: “It has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger . . . no one has ever allowed the cry for justice to hinder his ambition when he had a chance of gaining anything by might”47—though this passage, and the supposed speech of the Athenian leaders at Melos,48 may be exercises of Thucydides’ philosophical imagination, inflamed by the cynical discourses of certain Sophists; it would be as fair to judge the Greeks from the unconventional ethics of Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and Thucydides as it would be to describe the modern European by the brilliant bizarreries of Machiavelli, La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche, and Stirner—not saying how fair that would be. That something of this superiority to morals is an active ingredient in the Greek character appears in the readiness with which the Spartans agree with the Athenians on these mooted points of morals. When the Lacedaemonian Phoebidas, despite a treaty of peace, treacherously seizes upon the citadel of Thebes, and the Spartan King Agesilaus is questioned about the justice of this action, he replies: “Inquire only if it is useful; for whenever an action is useful to our country it is right.” Time and again truces are violated, solemn promises are broken, envoys are slain.49 Perhaps, however, the Greeks differ from ourselves not in conduct but in candor; our greater delicacy makes it offensive to us to preach what we practice.