The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  During the wars of old we bore with you. . . . But we observed you carefully; and oftentimes, when we were at home, we used to hear that you had decided some matter badly. When we inquired about it, the men would answer, “What’s that to you? Be silent.” And we asked, “How is it, husband, that you men manage these affairs so foolishly?”

  The leader of the men answers that women must keep out of public matter? because they cannot manage the treasury. (As they debate, some of the women steal away to their husbands, muttering Aristophanic excuses.) Lysistrata replies, “Why not? The wives have long had the management of their husbands’ purses, to the great advantage of both.” She argues so well that the men are finally persuaded to call a conference of the warring states. When the delegates are gathered, Lysistrata arranges that they shall have all the wine they can drink. Soon they are in a happy mood, and the long-delayed treaty is signed. The chorus ends the play with a paean to peace.

  2. Aristophanes and the Radicals

  Behind the disintegration of Athenian public life, in the view of Aristophanes, lay two basic evils: democracy and irreligion. He agreed with Socrates that the sovereignty of the people had become a sovereignty of politicians; but he was convinced that the skepticism of Socrates, Anaxagoras, and the Sophists had helped to loosen those moral bonds which had once made for social order and personal integrity. In The Clouds he made uproarious fun of the new philosophy. An old-fashioned gentleman by the name of Strepsiades, who is looking for an argument that may justify him in repudiating his debts, is delighted to hear that Socrates operates a Thinking Shop where one may learn to prove anything, even if it is false. He finds his way to the “School of Very Hard Thinkers.” In the middle of the classroom he sees Socrates suspended from the ceiling in a basket, engrossed in thought, while some of the students are bent down with noses to the ground.

  Strep. What are those people doing, stooping so oddly?

  Student. They are probing the secrets that lie deep as Tartarus.

  Strep. But why—excuse me, but—their hind quarters—why are they stuck up so strangely in the air?

  Stud. Their other ends are studying astronomy. (Strepsiades asks Socrates for lessons.)

  Socr. By what gods do you swear? For the gods are not a current coin with us. (Points to the chorus of clouds.) These are the real gods.

  Strep. But come, is there no Zeus?

  Socr. There is no Zeus.

  Strep. But who makes it rain, then?

  Socr. These clouds. For have you ever seen rain without clouds? But if it were Zeus he ought to rain in fine weather as well as when clouds appear. . . .

  Strep. But tell me, who is it that thunders? This makes me tremble.

  Socr. These clouds, as they roll, thunder.

  Strep. How?

  Socr. When they are full of water, and are driven along, they fall heavily upon each other, and burst with a clap.

  Strep. But who drives them? Is it not Zeus?

  Socr. Not at all; the ethereal Vortex drives them on.

  Strep. So the greatest of gods is Vortex. But what makes the clap of thunder?

  Socr. I will teach you from your own case. Were you ever, after being stuffed with broth at a festival, later disturbed in your stomach, and did a tumult suddenly rumble through you?

  In another scene Pheidippides, son of Strepsiades, meets in personification Just Argument and Unjust Argument. The first tells him that he must imitate the stoic virtues of the men of Marathon, but the other preaches to him the new morality. What good, asks Unjust Argument, have men ever gained by justice, or virtue, or moderation? For one honest successful and respected man there can always be found ten dishonest successful and respected men. Consider the gods themselves: they lied, stole, murdered, and committed adultery; and they are worshiped by all the Greeks. When Just Argument doubts that most successful men have been dishonest, Unjust Argument asks him:

  Come now, from what class do our lawyers spring?

  J. A. Well—from the blackguards.

  U. A. Surely. Tell me, again, what are our tragic poets?

  J. A. Blackguards.

  U. A. And our public orators?

  J. A. Blackguards all.

  U. A. Now look about you. (Turning and pointing to the audience.) Which class among our friends here seems the most numerous? (J. A. gravely examines the audience.)

  J. A. The blackguards have it by a large majority.

  Pheidippides is so apt a pupil of Unjust Argument that he beats his father, on the ground that he is strong enough to do it and enjoys it; and besides, he asks, “Did you not beat me when I was a boy?” Strepsiades begs for mercy in the name of Zeus, but Pheidippides informs him that Zeus no longer exists, having been replaced by Vortex. The enraged father runs out into the streets, and calls upon all good citizens to destroy this new philosophy. They attack and burn down the Thinking Shop, and Socrates barely escapes with his life.

  We do not know what part this comedy played in the tragedy of Socrates. It was brought out in 423, twenty-four years before the famous trial. Its good-humored satire does not seem to have offended the philosopher; we are told that he stood throughout the performance,128 to give his enemies a better shot. Plato pictures Socrates and Aristophanes as friends after the performance; Plato himself recommended the play to Dionysius I of Syracuse as a jolly extravaganza, and maintained his own friendship with Aristophanes even after his master’s death.129 Of the three accusers of Socrates in 399 one, Meletus, was a child when the comedy was presented, and another Anytus, was on friendly terms with Socrates after the play.130 Probably the later circulation of the play as literature did the sage more harm than its original performance; Socrates himself, in Plato’s report of his defense, referred to the play as one of the major sources of that bad reputation which was prejudicing his case with the jurors.

  There was another target in Athens at which Aristophanes aimed his satire; and in this case the mood was one of implacable hostility. He distrusted the skepticisms of the Sophists, the moral, economic, and political individualism that was undermining the state, the sentimental feminism that was agitating the women, and the socialism that was arousing the slaves. All these evils he saw at their clearest in Euripides; and he resolved to destroy with laughter the influence of the great dramatist upon the mind of Greece.

  He began in 411 with a play which he called The Thesmophoriazusae, from the women who celebrated in sexual exclusiveness the feast of Demeter and Persephone. The assembled devotees discuss the latest quips of Euripides against their sex, and plan revenge. Euripides gets wind of the proceedings, and persuades his father-in-law Mnesilochus to dress as a woman and enter the meeting to defend him. The first complainant alleges that the tragic dramatist has deprived her of a living: formerly she made wreaths for the temples, but since Euripides has shown that there are no gods, the temple business has been ruined. Mnesilochus defends Euripides on the ground that his worst sayings about women are visibly and audibly true, and are mild compared with what women themselves know to be their faults. The ladies suspect that this traducer of the sex cannot be a woman; they tear off Mnesilochus’ disguise, and he saves himself from dismemberment only by snatching a babe from a woman’s arms and threatening to kill it if they touch him. As they nevertheless attack him, he unwraps the child, and finds that it is a wineskin disguised to escape the collector of internal revenue. He proposes to cut its throat just the same, much to the distress of its owner. “Spare my darling!” she cries; “or at least bring a bowl, and if it must die, let us catch its blood.” Mnesilochus solves the problem by drinking the wine, and meanwhile sending an appeal to Euripides for rescue. Euripides appears in various parts from his plays—now as Menelaus, now as Perseus, now as Echo—and finally arranges Mnesilochus’ escape.

  The Frogs (405) returns to the assault despite Euripides’ death. Dionysus, god of the drama, is dissatisfied with the surviving playwrights of Athens, and descends to Hades to bring back Euripides. As he is ferried over to the l
ower world a choir of frogs greets him with a croaking chorus that must have provided a month’s catchword for young Athenians. Aristophanes pokes much fun at Dionysus in passing, and boldly parodies the Mysteries of Eleusis. When the god arrives in Hades he finds Euripides attempting to unseat Aeschylus as king of all dramatists. Aeschylus accuses Euripides of spreading skepticism and a dangerous casuistry, and of corrupting the morals of Athenian women and youth; ladies of refinement, he says, have been known to kill themselves through shame at having heard Euripides’ obscenities. A pair of scales is brought in, and each poet throws into it lines from his plays; one mighty phrase of Aeschylus (here the satire strikes the older poet too) tips the scale against a dozen of Euripides. At last Aeschylus proposes that the younger dramatist shall leap into one scale with wife, children, and baggage, while he will guarantee to find a couplet that will outweigh them all. In the end the great skeptic loses the contest, and Aeschylus is brought back to Athens as victor.* This oldest known essay in literary criticism received the first prize from the judges, and so pleased the audience that another performance of it was given a few days afterward.

  In a middling play called The Ecclesiazusae (393)—i.e., The Assemblywomen—Aristophanes turned his laughter upon the radical movement in general. The ladies of Athens disguise themselves as men, pack the Assembly, outvote their husbands, brothers, and sons, and elect themselves rulers of the state. Their leader is a fiery suffragette, Praxagora, who berates her sex as fools for letting themselves be ruled by such dolts as men, and proposes that all wealth shall be divided equally among the citizens, leaving the slaves uncontaminated with gold. The attack upon Utopia takes a more graceful form in Aristophanes’ masterpiece, The Birds (414). Two citizens who despair of Athens climb up to the abode of the birds, hoping to find there an ideal life. With the help of the birds they build, between earth and heaven, a Utopian city, Nephelococcygia, or Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. The birds, in a chorus as lyrically perfect as anything in the tragic poets, apostrophize mankind:

  Ye children of man, whose life is a span,

  Protracted with sorrow from day to day,

  Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous,

  Sickly calamitous creatures of clay,

  Attend to the words of the sovereign birds,

  Immortal, illustrious lords of the air,

  Who survey from on high, with a merciful eye,

  Your struggles of misery, labor, and care.

  The birds plan to intercept all communication between the gods and men; no sacrifices shall be allowed to mount to heaven; soon, say the reformers, the old gods will starve, and the birds will be supreme. New gods are invented in the image of birds, and those conceived in the image of men are deposed. Finally an embassy comes from Olympus, seeking a truce; the leader of the birds agrees to take as his wife the handmaiden of Zeus, and the play ends in a happy marriage.

  3. The Artist and the Thinker

  Aristophanes is an unclassifiable mixture of beauty, wisdom, and filth. When the mood is upon him he can write lyrics of purest Greek serene, which no translator has ever yet conveyed. His dialogue is life itself, or perhaps it is swifter, racier, more vigorous than life dares be. He belongs with Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Dickens in the lusty vitality of his style; and like theirs his characters give us more keenly the shape and aroma of the time than all the works of the historians; no one who has not read Aristophanes can know the Athenians. His plots are ridiculous, and are put together with an almost extempore carelessness; sometimes the main theme is exhausted before the play is half through, and the remainder limps forward on the crutches of burlesque. The humor is generally of a low order; it cracks and groans with facile puns, drags itself out to tragic lengths, and too often depends upon digestion, reproduction, and excretion. In The Acharnians we hear of a character who eases himself continuously for eight months;131 in The Clouds the major forms of human waste are mingled with sublime philosophy;132 every second page offers us rumps, wind, bosoms, gonads, coitus, pederasty, onanism; everything is here.133 He charges his old rival, Cratinus, with nocturnal incontinence.”134 He is the most contemporary of ancient poets, for nothing is so timeless as obscenity. Coming to him after any other Greek author—worst of all, after Euripides—he seems depressingly vulgar, and we find it difficult to imagine the same audience enjoying them both.

  If we are good conservatives we can stomach all this on the ground that Aristophanes attacks every form of radicalism, and upholds devotedly every ancient virtue and vice. He is the most immoral of all Greek writers known to us, but he hopes to make up for it by attacking immorality. He is always found on the side of the rich, but he denounces cowardice; he lies pitilessly about Euripides, living and dead, but he assails dishonesty; he describes the women of Athens as unbelievably coarse, but he exposes Euripides for defaming them; he burlesques the gods so boldly* that in comparison with the pious Socrates we must picture him as an hilarious atheist—but he is all for religion, and accuses the philosophers of undermining the gods. Yet it took real courage to caricature the powerful Cleon, and to paint the faults of Demos to Demos’ face; it took insight to see, in the trend of religion and morals from sophistic skepticism to epicurean individualism, a basic danger to the life of Athens. Perhaps Athens would have fared better if it had taken some of his advice, moderated her imperialism, made an early peace with Sparta, and mitigated with aristocratic leadership the chaos and corruption of post-Periclean democracy.

  Aristophanes failed because he did not take his own counsels seriously enough to observe them himself. His excesses of pornography and abuse were partly responsible for the law forbidding personal satire; and though the law was soon repealed, the Old Comedy of political criticism died before the death of Aristophanes (385), and was replaced, even in his later plays, by the Middle Comedy of manners and romance. But the vitality of the Greek comic theater disappeared along with its extravagance and brutality. Philemon and Menander rose and passed and were forgotten, while Aristophanes survived all changes of moral and literary fashions to come down to our own time with eleven of his forty-two plays intact. Even today, despite all difficulties of understanding and translation, Aristophanes is alive; and, if we hold our noses, we can read him with profane delight.

  VII. THE HISTORIANS

  Prose was not completely forgotten in this heyday of dramatic poetry. Oratory, stimulated by democracy and litigation, became one of the passions of Greece. As early as 466 Corax of Syracuse wrote a treatise, Techne Logon (The Art of Words), to guide the citizen who wished to address an assembly or a jury; here already are the traditional divisions of an oration into introduction, narrative, argument, subsidiary remarks, and peroration. Gorgias brought the art to Athens, and Antiphon used the ornate style of Gorgias in speeches and pamphlets devoted to oligarchical propaganda. In Lysias Greek oratory became more natural and vivid; but it was only in the greatest statesmen, like Themistocles and Pericles, that the public address rose above all visible artifice, and proved the effectiveness of simple speech. The new weapon was sharpened by the Sophists, and so thoroughly exploited by their pupils that when the oligarchic party seized power in 404 it forbade the further teaching of rhetoric.”136

  The great achievement of Periclean prose was history. In a sense it was the fifth century that discovered the past, and consciously sought for a perspective of man in time. In Herodotus historiography has all the charm and vigor of youth; in Thucydides fifty years later, it has already reached a degree of maturity which no later age has ever surpassed. What separates and distinguishes these two historians is the Sophist philosophy. Herodotus was the simpler, perhaps the kindlier, certainly the more cheerful spirit. He was born in Halicarnassus about 484, of a family exalted enough to participate in political intrigue; because of his uncle’s adventures he was exiled at the age of thirty-two, and began those far-reaching travels that supplied the background for his Histories. He passed down through Phoenicia to Egypt, as far south as Elephantine; he moved west to Cyrene
, east to Susa, and north to the Greek cities on the Black Sea. Wherever he went he observed and inquired with the eye of a scientist and the curiosity of a child; and when, about 447, he settled down in Athens, he was armed with a rich assortment of notes concerning the geography, history, and manners of the Mediterranean states. With these notes, and a little plagiarizing of Hecataeus and other predecessors, he composed the most famous of all historical works, recording the life and history of Egypt, the Near East, and Greece from their legendary origins to the close of the Persian War. An ancient story tells how he read parts of his book publicly at Athens and Olympia, and so pleased the Athenians with his account of the war. and their exploits in it, that they voted him twelve talents ($60,000)—which any historian will consider too pleasant to be true.137

  The introduction announces the purpose of the book in grand style:

  This is a presentation of the Inquiries (Historiai) of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, to the end that time may not obliterate the great and marvelous deeds of the Hellenes and the Barbarians; and especially that the causes for which they waged war with one another may not be forgotten.

  Since all the nations of the eastern Mediterranean are brought into the narrative, the book is, in a limited sense, a “universal history,” much broader in its scope than the narrow subject of Thucydides. The story is unconsciously unified by the contrast of barbarian despotism with Greek democracy, and moves, though by halting steps and confusing digressions, to a foreshadowed and epic end at Salamis. The purpose is to record “wondrous deeds and wars,”138 and in truth the tale sometimes recalls Gibbon’s regrettable misunderstanding of history as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”139 Nevertheless Herodotus, though he speaks in only the most incidental way of literature, science, philosophy, and art, finds room for a thousand interesting illustrations of the dress, manners, morals, and beliefs of the societies he describes. He tells us how Egyptian cats jump into the fire, how the Danubians get drunk on smells, how the walls of Babylon were built, how the Massagetae eat their parents, and how the priestess of Athena at Pedasus grew a mighty beard. He presents not only kings and queens, but men of all degrees; and women, who are excluded from Thucydides, enliven these pages with their scandals, their beauty, their cruelties, and their charm.