The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  There is, as Strabo says, “much nonsense in Herodotus”;”140 but our historian, like Aristotle, covers a vast field, and has many opportunities to err. His ignorance is as wide as his learning, his credulity is as great as his wisdom. He thinks that the semen of Ethiopians is black,141 accepts the legend that the Lacedaemonians won battles because they had brought the bones of Orestes to Sparta,142 and reports incredible figures for the size of Xerxes’ army, the casualties of the Persians, and the almost woundless victories of the Greeks. His account is patriotic, but not unjust; he gives both sides of most political disputes,* signalizes the heroism of the invaders, and testifies to the honor and chivalry of the Persians. When he depends upon foreign informants he makes his greatest mistakes; so he thinks that Nebuchadrezzar was a woman, that the Alps are a river, and that Cheops came after Rameses III. But when he deals with matters that he has had a chance to observe in person he is more reliable, and his statements are increasingly confirmed as our knowledge grows.

  He swallows many superstitions, records many miracles, quotes oracles piously, and darkens his pages with omens and auguries; he gives the dates of Semele, Dionysus, and Heracles; and presents all history, like a Greek Bossuet, as the drama of a Divine Providence rewarding the virtues and punishing the sins, crimes, and insolent prosperity of men. But he has his rationalistic moments, perhaps having heard the Sophists in his later years: he suggests that Homer and Hesiod gave name and form to the Olympian deities, that custom determines men’s faiths, and that one man knows as much as another about the gods;143 having accepted Providence as the final arbiter of history, he puts it aside, and looks for natural causes; he compares and identifies the myths of Dionysus and Osiris in the manner of a scientist; he smiles tolerantly at some tales of divine intervention, and offers a possible natural explanation;144 and he reveals his general method with a twinkle in his eye when he says: “I am under obligation to tell what is reported, but I am not obliged to believe it; and let this hold for every narrative in this history.”145 He is the first Greek historian whose works have come down to us; and in that sense Cicero may be forgiven for calling him the Father of History. Lucian, like most of the ancients, ranked him above Thucydides.146

  Nevertheless the difference between the mind of Herodotus and that of Thucydides is almost the difference between adolescence and maturity. Thucydides is one of the phenomena of the Greek Enlightenment, a descendant of the Sophists as Gibbon was a spiritual nephew of Bayle and Voltaire. His father was a rich Athenian who owned gold mines in Thrace; his mother was a Thracian of distinguished family. He received all the education available in Athens, and grew up in the odor of skepticism. When the Peloponnesian War broke out he kept a record of it from day to day. In 430 he suffered from the plague. In 424, aged thirty-six (or forty), he was chosen one of two generals to command a naval expedition to Thrace. Because he failed to lead his forces to Amphipolis in time to relieve it from siege, he was exiled by the Athenians. He spent the next twenty years of his life in travel, especially in the Peloponnesus; to this direct acquaintance with the enemy we owe something of the impressive impartiality that distinguishes his book. The oligarchic revolution of 404 ended his exile, and he returned to Athens. He died—some say by murder—in or before 396, leaving unfinished his History of the Peloponnesian War.

  He begins it simply:

  Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians from the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be an important war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.

  He opens his introductory narrative where Herodotus left off, at the close of the Persian War. It is a pity that the genius of the greatest Greek historians saw nothing worthier of relation in Greek life than its wars. Herodotus wrote partly with an eye to entertain the educated reader; Thucydides writes to furnish information for future historians, and the guidance of precedent for future statesmanship. Herodotus wrote in a loose and easygoing style, inspired perhaps by the rambling epics of Homer; Thucydides, like one who has heard the philosophers, the orators, and the dramatists, writes in a style often involved and obscure because it attempts to be at once brief, precise, and profound, a style occasionally spoiled by Gorgian rhetoric and embellishment, but sometimes as terse and vivid as Tacitus, and rising, in the more crucial moments, to a dramatic power as intense as anything in Euripides; nothing in the dramatists can surpass the pages that describe the expedition to Syracuse, the vacillations of Nicias, and the horrors that followed his defeat. Herodotus ranged from place to place and from age to age; Thucydides forces his story into a rigid chronological frame of seasons and years, sacrificing the continuity of his narrative. Herodotus wrote in terms of personalities rather than processes, feeling that processes operate through personalities; Thucydides, though he recognizes the role of exceptional individuals in history, and occasionally lightens his theme with a portrait of Pericles or Alcibiades or Nicias, leans rather to impersonal recording and the consideration of causes, developments, and results. Herodotus wrote of far-off events reported to him in most cases at second or third hand; Thucydides speaks often as an eyewitness, or as one who has spoken with eyewitnesses, or has seen the original documents; in several instances he gives the documents concerned. He has a keen conscience for accuracy; even his geography has been verified in detail. He seldom passes moralistic judgments upon men or events; he lets his patrician scorn of Athenian democracy get the better of him in picturing Cleon, but for the greater part he keeps himself aloof from his story, gives the facts with fairness to both sides, and recounts the story of Thucydides’ brief military career as if he had never known, much less been, the man. He is the father of scientific method in history, and is proud of the care and industry with which he has worked. “On the whole,” he says, with a glance at Herodotus,

  the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, be safely relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth’s expense—the subjects they treat being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend. Turning from these, we can rest satisfied with having proceeded upon the clearest data, and having arrived at conclusions as exact as can be expected in matters of such antiquity. . . . The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future—which, in the course of human affairs, must resemble, if it does not reflect, the past—I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.147

  Nevertheless, he yields accuracy to interest in one particular: he has a passion for putting elegant speeches into the mouths of his characters. He frankly admits that these orations are mostly imaginary, but they help him to explain and vivify personalities, ideas, and events. He claims that each speech represents the substance of an address actually given at the time; if this is true, all Greek statesmen and generals must have studied rhetoric with Gorgias, philosophy with the Sophists, and ethics with Thrasymachus. The speeches have all the same style, the same subtlety, the same realism of view; they make the laconic Laconian as windy as any Sophistbred Athenian. They put the most undiplomatic arguments into the mouths of diplomats,* and the most compromising honesty into the words of generals. The “Funeral Oration” of Pericles is an excellent essay on the virtues of Athens, and comes with fine grace from the pen of an exile; but Pericles was famous for simplicity of speech rather than for rhetoric; and Plutarch spoils the romance by saying that Pericles left nothing written, and that of his sayings hardly anything was preserved.148

  Thucydides has defects corresponding to his virtues. He is as severe as a Thracian, and lacks the vivacity an
d wit of the Athenian spirit; there is no humor in his book. He is so absorbed in “this war, of which Thucydides is the historian” (a proudly recurring phrase) that he has an eye only for political and military events. He fills his pages with martial details, but makes no mention of any artist, or any work of art. He seeks causes sedulously, but seldom sinks beneath political to economic factors in the determination of events. Though writing for future generations, he tells us nothing of the constitutions of the Greek states, nothing of the life of the cities, nothing of the institutions of society. He is as exclusive towards women as towards the gods; he will not have them in his story; and he makes the gallant Pericles, who risked his career for a courtesan advocate of feminine freedom, say that “a woman’s best fame is to be as seldom as possible mentioned by men, either for censure or for praise.”149 Face to face with the greatest age in the history of culture, he loses himself in the logic-chopping fluctuations of military victory and defeat, and leaves unsung the vibrant life of the Athenian mind. He remains a general even after he has become an historian.

  We are grateful for him, nevertheless, and must not complain too much that he did not write what he did not undertake to write. Here at least is an historical method, a reverence for truth, an acuteness of observation, an impartiality of judgment, a passing splendor of language and fascination of style, a mind both sharp and profound, whose ruthless realism is a tonic to our naturally romantic souls. Here are no legends, no myths, and no miracles. He accepts the heroic tales, but tries to explain them in naturalistic terms. As for the gods, he is devastatingly silent; they have no place in his history. He is sarcastic about oracles and their safe ambiguity,150 and scornfully exposes the stupidity of Nicias in relying upon oracles rather than knowledge. He recognizes no guiding Providence, no divine plan, not even “progress”; he sees life and history as a tragedy at once sordid and noble, redeemed now and then by great men, but always relapsing into superstition and war. In him the conflict between religion and philosophy is decided; and philosophy wins.

  Plutarch and Athenaeus refer to hundreds of Greek historians. Nearly all of them but Herodotus and Thucydides, in the Golden Age, have been covered up by the silt of time; and of the later historians only paragraphs remain. The case is no different with the other forms of Greek literature. Of the hundreds of tragic dramatists who won prizes at the Dionysia, we have a few plays by three; of the many comic writers we have one; of the great philosophers we have two. All in all, not more than one-twentieth survives from the critically acclaimed literature of fifth-century Greece; and from the earlier and later centuries even less.151 Most of what we have comes from Athens; the other cities, as we can tell from the philosophers that they sent to Athens, were fertile in genius too, but their culture was sooner engulfed by barbarism from without and from below, and their manuscripts were lost in the disorder of revolution and war. We must judge the whole from the fragments of a part.

  Even so it is a rich heritage, if not in quantity (but who has absorbed it all?), surely in form. Form and order are the essence of the classic style in literature as well as in art: the typical Greek writer, like the Greek artist, is never satisfied with mere expression, but longs to give form and beauty to his material. He cuts his matter down to brevity, rearranges it into clarity, transforms it into a complex simplicity; he is always direct, and seldom obscure; he shuns exaggeration and bias, and even when he is romantic in feeling he struggles to be logical in thought. This persistent effort to subordinate fancy to reason is the dominant quality of the Greek mind, even of Greek poetry. Therefore Greek literature is “modern,” or rather contemporary; we find it hard to understand Dante or Milton, but Euripides and Thucydides are kin to us mentally, and belong to our age. And that is because, though myths may differ, reason remains the same, and the life of reason makes brothers of its lovers in all times, and everywhere.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  The Suicide of Greece

  I. THE GREEK WORLD IN THE AGE OF PERICLES

  LET us, before facing the melancholy spectacle of the Peloponnesian War, glance at the Greek world outside of Attica. Our knowledge of these other states in this period is so fragmentary that we are left to assume—what we cannot prove—that they shared to a minor degree in the cultural blossoming of the Golden Age.

  In 459 Pericles, anxious to control Egyptian grain, sent a great fleet to expel the Persians from Egypt. The expedition failed, and thereafter Pericles adopted the policy of Themistocles—to win the world by commerce rather than by war. Throughout the fifth century Egypt and Cyprus continued under Persian rule. Rhodes remained free, and the merger of its three cities into one in 408 prepared it to become in the Hellenistic period one of the richest commercial centers in the Mediterranean. The Greek cities of Asia preserved their independence, won at Mycale in 479, until the destruction of the Athenian Empire left them helpless again before the tribute collectors of the Great King. The Greek colonies in Thrace and on the Hellespont, the Propontis, and the Euxine prospered under Athenian domination, but were impoverished by the Peloponnesian War. Under Archelaus Macedonia passed out of barbarism and became one of the powers of the Greek world: good roads were laid down, a disciplined army was formed out of the hardy mountaineers, a handsome new capital was built at Pella, and many Greek geniuses, like Timotheus, Zeuxis, and Euripides, found welcome at the court. Boeotia in this period produced Pindar, and gave to Greece, in the Boeotian Confederacy, an unappreciated example of how independent states might live in peace and co-operation.

  In Italy the Greek cities suffered from frequent wars, and from Athenian ascendancy in maritime trade. In 443 Pericles sent out a group of Hellenes, gathered from different states, to establish near the site of Sybaris the new colony of Thurii, as an experiment in Panhellenic unity. Protagoras drew up a code of laws for the city, and Hippodamus the architect laid out the streets on a rectangular plan that was to be widely imitated in the following centuries. Within a few years the colonists divided into factions according to their origin, and most of the Athenians, probably including Herodotus, went back to Athens.

  Sicily, always turbulent but always fertile, continued to grow in wealth and culture. Selinus and Acragas built massive temples; and under Theron Acragas became so rich that Empedocles remarked: “The men of Acragas devote themselves wholly to luxury as if they were to die tomorrow, but they furnish their houses as if they were to live forever.”1 Gelon I, when he died in 478, left Syracuse a system of administration almost as effective as that which Napoleon bequeathed to modern France. Under his brother and successor, Hieron I, the city became a center not only of trade and wealth, but of literature, science, and art. There, too, luxury reached dizzy heights: Syracusan banquets became a byword for extravagance, and “Corinthian girls” were so numerous in the city that any man who slept at home was considered a saint.2 The citizens were quick of mind and sharp of tongue; they enjoyed good oratory to their ruin, and crowded to hear, in their magnificent open-air theater, the comedies of Epicharmus and the tragedies of Aeschylus.* Hieron was a tyrant of bad temper and good will, cruel to his enemies and generous to his friends. He opened his court and purse to Simonides, Bacchylides, Pindar, and Aeschylus, and with their help made Syracuse for a moment the intellectual capital of Greece.

  But man cannot live on art alone. The Syracusans thirsted for the wine of freedom, and after the death of Hieron they deposed his brother and set up a limited democracy. The other Greek cities in the island took courage and likewise expelled their dictators; the trading classes overthrew the landowning aristocracies, and established a commercial democracy superimposed upon a system of ruthless slavery. After some sixty years, war ended this interlude of liberty as it had ended another through Gelon I. In 409 the Carthaginians, who had kept alive through three generations the memory of Hamilcar’s defeat at Himera, invaded Sicily with an armada of fifteen hundred ships and twenty thousand men under Hamilcar’s grandson, Hannibal. He laid siege to Selinus, which had become pacific under p
rosperity, and had neglected to keep its defenses in repair. The surprised city appealed for help to Acragas and Syracuse, whose comfortable citizens responded with Spartan leisureliness. Selinus was taken, all the survivors were massacred and mutilated, and the city became a part of the Carthaginian Empire. Hannibal proceeded to Himera, captured it with ease, and put three thousand prisoners to torture and death to appease the shade of his grandfather. A plague decimated his troops and took off Hannibal himself as they besieged Acragas, but his successor mollified the gods of Carthage by burning alive his own son as an offering. The Carthaginians took the city, took Gela and Camarina, and marched on toward Syracuse. The terrified Syracusans, interrupted in their banquets, gave absolute power to their ablest general, Dionysius. But Dionysius made peace with the Carthaginians, ceded to them all southern Sicily, and used his troops to establish a second dictatorship (405). It was not all treachery. Dionysius knew that resistance was useless; he surrendered everything but his army and his city, and resolved to strengthen both until he too, like Gelon, could expel the invaders from Sicily.

  II. HOW THE GREAT WAR BEGAN

  Just as the simple soul must picture deity in the form of a man, so the simple citizen must conceive the causes of war to be personal—usually one person. Even Aristophanes, like some gossips of his time, would have it that Pericles brought on the Peloponnesian War by attacking Megara, because Megara had offended Aspasia.3