by Will Durant
O Heavens, what a mob! I can’t imagine
How we’re to squeeze through, or how long it’ll take;
An ant-heap is nothing to this hurly-burly . . .
O Gorgon, darling, look!—what shall we do?
The royal cavalry! Don’t ride us down!
Eunoa, get out of the way!26
How could a man with the soul of a poet and memories of Sicily be happy in such an environment? He praised the King for bread, but fed his spirit on fancies of his native island, and perhaps of Cos; he envied the simple life of the shepherd pacing with his placid animals grassy slopes overlooking sunny seas. In this mood he perfected the idyl—the eidyllion or little picture—and gave it the connotation that it keeps today, of a rustic cameo or a poetic tale. Only ten of the thirty-two pieces that have come down to us from Theocritus are pastoral poetry; but these have set a halfrural stamp upon the name that covers them all. Here at last nature entered Greek literature, not as a goddess merely, but as the living and lovable features of the earth. Never before had Greek literature conveyed so feelingly the secret sense of kinship that stirs the soul with gratitude and affection for rocks and streams, water and soil and sky.
But another theme reaches even more deeply into the heart of Theocritus—romantic love. He is still a Greek, indites two lyrics (xii and xxix) to homosexual friendship, and tells with vivid sentiment the story of Heracles and Hylas (xiii)—how the giant, “who withstood the ferocity of the lion, loved a youth and taught him like a father everything by which he might become a good and illustrious man; nor would he leave the lad at dawn, or noon, or evening, but sought continually to fashion him after his own heart, and to make him a right yoke-fellow with him in mighty deeds.” A more famous idyl (i) rehearses Stesichorus’ tale of Daphnis the Sicilian shepherd, who piped and sang so well that legend made him the inventor of bucolic (i.e., cow-tending) poetry. For a while Daphnis watched his herd, and envied their amorous play. When the first hair had sprouted on his lip a divine nymph fell in love with him, and had him for her mate. But as the price of her favors, she made him swear that he would never love another woman. He tried hard to keep his vow, and succeeded till a king’s daughter became enamored of his youth and gave herself to him in the fields. Aphrodite saw it, and revenged her fellow goddess by making Daphnis waste away with unrequited love. As he died he bequeathed his pipe to Pan in a song to which the narrator adds a haunting refrain:
“Master, approach; take to thee this fair pipe
Bedded in wax that breathes of honey still,
Bound at the lips with twine. For Love has come
To hale me off unto the house of Death.”
Muses, forego, forego the pastoral song.
“Now let the briar and the thistle flower
With violets, and the fair narcissus bloom
On junipers; let all things go awry,
And pines grow pears, since Daphnis is for death.
Let stags pursue the hounds, and from the hills
The screeching owls outsing the nightingales.”
Muses, forego, forego the pastoral song.
So said he then—no more. And Aphrodite
Was fain to raise him; but the Destinies
Had spun his thread right out. So Daphnis went
Down-stream; the whirlpool closed above his head,
The head of him whom all the Muses loved,
Of him from whom the Nymphs were not estranged.
Muses, forego, forego the pastoral song.27
The second idyl continues the theme of love, but in a fiercer mood. Simaetha, maid of Syracuse, seduced and deserted by Delphis, seeks to command his love by filters and charms; if she fails she is resolved to poison him. Standing under the stars she tells Selene, goddess of the moon, with what hot jealousy she saw Delphis walking with his comrade.
Scarce had we reached the midpoint of the road by the dwelling of Lycon,
Delphis when I beheld with Eudanippus advancing:
Blonder of cheek and chin were the youths than yellowing ivy,
Yea, and their breasts far brighter of sheen than thou, O Selene,
Showing they just had come from the noble toil of the wrestlers.
Think on my love, and think whence it came, thou Lady Selene.
I, when I saw, how I raged, how the flame took hold of my bosom, Burned my love-lost heart! My beauty waned, and no longer
Watched I the pomp as it passed; nor how I returned to my homestead
Knew I, for some fell bane, some parching disease had undone me.
Ten days, stretched on my bed, and ten nights dwelt I in anguish.
Think on my love, and think whence it came, thou Lady Selene.
Often the bloom of my flesh grew dry and yellow as dye-wood, Yea, and the hairs of my head fell off, and of all that I once was Naught but skin was left, and bones; and to whom did I not turn, Whose road left I unsought where an old crone chanted a lovecharm? Still no solace I found, and time sped ever a-flying.
Think on my love, and think whence it came, thou Lady Selene.
The third idyl introduces us to the nymph Amaryllis, and her unattainable charms; the fourth to the shepherd Corydon, the seventh to the poetic goatherd Lycidas—names destined to be invoked by a thousand poets again from Virgil to Tennyson. These rustics are idealized, and speak the most exquisite Greek; any one of them can sing hexameters lovelier than Homer’s; but we learn to accept their incredible gifts as a tolerable convention when we surrender to the plaintive lilt of their songs. Theocritus redeems their reality with the smell of their jackets and the occasional obscenity of their thoughts; a lusty vein of humor salts their sentiment, and makes them men. All in all, this is the most perfect Greek poetry written after Euripides, the only extant Hellenistic verse that has the breath of life.
V. POLYBIUS
If the Hellenistic age inspired but one great poet, it produced an unprecedented quantity and variety of prose. It invented the imaginary conversation, the essay, and the encyclopedia; it continued the tradition of writing brief and vivid biographies; and in the Roman sequel Greek literature would add the sermon and the novel. Oratory was a dying mode, for it had depended upon the game of politics, litigation before popular courts, and the democratic right to talk. The letter became a favorite vehicle, for both communication and literature; now were established the epistolary forms and phrases that we find in Cicero, and even the famous exordium dear to our grandfathers: “Hoping that this finds you as well as it leaves me.”28
Historiography flourished. Ptolemy I, Aratus of Achaea, and Pyrrhus of Epirus wrote memoirs of their campaigns, establishing a tradition that culminated in Caesar. The Egyptian high priest Manetho wrote in Greek an Aigyptiaka, or Annals of Egypt, which bundled the Pharaohs somewhat arbitrarily into those dynasties that classify them to this day. Berosus, high priest of the Chaldeans, dedicated to Antiochus I a history of Babylon based upon the cuneiform records. Megasthenes, ambassador of Seleucus I to Chandragupta Maurya, startled the Greek world, about 300, with a book on India. “There is among the Brahmans,” said a suggestive passage, “a sect of philosophers who . . . hold that God is the Word, by which they mean not articulate speech but the discourse of reason”;29 here again was that doctrine of Logos which was destined to make such an impress upon Christian theology. Timaeus af Tauromenium (Taormina), having been exiled from Sicily by Agathocles (317), traveled widely in Spain and Gaul, and then settled down in Athens to write a history of Sicily and the West. He was an industrious student, so anxious to include everything that some of his rivals called him “an old ragpicker.”30 He labored to arrive at an accurate chronology, and hit upon the scheme of dating events by Olympiads. He criticized his predecessors severely, and was lucky enough to die before seeing the brutal attack made upon his work by Polybius.31
The greatest of the Hellenistic historians, and the only Greek fit to make a triad with Herodotus and Thucydides, was born at Megalopolis, in Arcadia (208). His father, Lycortas, was one
of the leading men of the Achaean League, being ambassador to Rome in 189 and strategos in 184. The boy was brought up in the odor of politics, was trained as a soldier under Philopoemen, fought in the Roman campaign against the Gauls in Asia Minor, was associated with his father on an embassy to Egypt (181), and was made the League’s hipparchos, or commander of the cavalry, in 169.32 He paid for his prominence: when the Romans punished the League for supporting Perseus against them they took a thousand leading Achaeans to Rome as hostages, and Polybius was among them (167). For sixteen years he suffered exile, and at times, he tells us, “utter loss of spirit and paralysis of mind.”33 But the younger Scipio befriended him, introduced him to the Scipionic circle of educated Romans, and persuaded the Senate, when it was scattering the other exiles throughout Italy, to let Polybius live with him in Rome. He accompanied Scipio on many campaigns, gave him valuable military advice, explored for him the coasts of Spain and Africa, and stood beside him at the burning of Carthage (146). He had received his freedom in 151, and in 149 he was employed as the representative of Rome in arranging a modus vivendi between the cities of Greece and their distant master, the Roman Senate. He must have performed this ungrateful task well, for several cities honored him with monuments—though one can never tell in what tense man’s gratitude is felt. Having lived through sixty full years of action, he retired to write a Treatise on Tactics, a Life of Philopoemen, and his immense Histories. He died like a gentleman by falling from his horse as he was returning from a hunt, at the age of eighty-two.
No man ever wrote history from a wider background of education, travel, and experience. His work was conceived on a grand scale, and proposed to tell the story, not only of Greece but of “the whole world” (i.e., the Mediterranean nations) from 221 to 146 B.C. “Such is the plan I propose; but all depends upon Fortune’s granting me a life long enough to execute it.”34 He rightly felt that the center of political history, in the period which he covered, lay in Rome; he gave his book unity by making Rome the focus of its events, and studying with a diplomat’s curiosity the methods by which Rome, with British casualness, had mastered the Mediterranean world.35 He admired the Romans intensely, for he had seen them in their greatest epoch, and had known chiefly the best of them in Scipio’s group; they had, he felt, just those qualities that were fatally lacking in Greek character and government. Himself an aristocrat, and befriended by aristocrats, he had no sympathy with what seemed to him mere mob rule in the later stages of Greek democracy. Political history appeared to him to be a repetitious cycle of monarchy (or dictatorship), aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and monarchy. The best escape from this cycle, he thought, was through a “mixed constitution” like that of Lycurgus or Rome—an enfranchised but limited citizenry choosing its own magistrates, but checked by the power of a continuous and aristocratic senate.36 It was from this viewpoint that he wrote down the record of his times.
Polybius is “the historians’ historian” because he is as interested in his method as in his subject. He likes to talk about his plan of procedure, and philosophizes at every opportunity. Humanly he pictures his own qualifications as ideal. He insists that history should be written by those who have seen—or have directly consulted others who have seen—the events to be described. He denounces Timaeus for having relied on his ears rather than his eyes, and tells with pride of his own travels in search of data, documents, and geographical veracity; he reminds us how, in returning from Spain to Italy, he crossed the Alps by the same pass that Hannibal had used, and how he went down into the very toe of Italy to decipher an inscription left by Hannibal in Brutium.37 He proposes to make his history as accurate as “the magnitude of the work and its comprehensive treatment” will allow;38 and he succeeds, so far as we can say, better than any other Greek except Thucydides. He argues that the historian should have been a man of affairs, versed in the actual processes of statesmanship, politics, and war; otherwise he will never understand the behavior of states or the course of history.39 He is a realist and a rationalist; he pierces the moral phrases of diplomats to the actual motives of policy. It amuses him to observe how easily men can be deceived, singly or en masse, and even repeatedly by the same tricks.40 “What is good,” says a scandalous presage of Machiavelli, “very seldom coincides with what is advantageous, and few are those who can combine the two and adapt them to each other.”41 He accepts the Stoic theology of a Divine Providence, but he merely pities the popular cults of his day, and smiles at stories of supernatural intervention.42 He recognizes the role of chance in history, and the occasional efficacy of great men,43 but he is resolved to lay bare the factual and often impersonal chain of causes and effects, so that history may be a lantern of understanding held up to the present and the future.44 “There is no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past”; and “the soundest education and training for a life of active politics is the study of history”;45 “it is history, and history alone, which, without involving us in actual danger, will mature our judgment and prepare us to take right views, whatever may be the crisis or the posture of affairs.”46 The best method of history, he thinks, will be that which sees the life of a nation as an organic unity, and weaves the story of each part into the life history of the whole. “He who believes that by studying isolated histories he can acquire a just view of history as a whole is, as it seems to me, much in the case of one who, after having looked at the dissevered limbs of an animal once alive and beautiful, fancies he has been as good as an eyewitness of the creature itself in all its action and grace.”47
Of the forty books into which Polybius divided his Histories, time has preserved five, and the epitomists have rescued substantial fragments of the rest. It is a great pity that the execution of this vast conception is marred by degenerate Greek, peevish critiques of other historians, an almost exclusive preoccupation with politics and war, and an absurd segmentation of the narrative into Olympiads, giving the history of all the Mediterranean nations in each four-year period, and leading to exasperating digressions and a baffling discontinuity. Sometimes, as in the story of Hannibal’s invasion, Polybius mounts to drama and eloquence, but he reacts so strongly against the florid rhetoric popular among his immediate predecessors that he makes it a point of honor to be dull.48 “No one,” said an ancient critic, “ever read him through.”49 The world has almost forgotten him; but historians will long continue to study him because he was one of the greatest theorists and practitioners of historiography; because he dared to take a wide view and write a “universal history”; and because, above all, he understood that mere facts are worthless except through their interpretation, and that the past has no value except as our roots and our illumination.
CHAPTER XXVII
The Art of the Dispersion
I. A MISCELLANY
THE decline of Greek civilization was longest deferred in the sphere of art. Here the Hellenistic age bears comparison, not only in fertility but even in originality, with any period in history. Certainly the minor arts suffered no deterioration. Skilled workers in wood, ivory, silver, and gold were scattered throughout the expanded Greek world. The engraving of gems and coins now reached its highest excellence; as far east as Bactria Hellenized kings lavished art upon their currency, and in the west the dekadrachma of Hieron II might be defended as the finest coin in numismatic record. Alexandria became famous for its goldsmiths and silversmiths, whose artistry rivaled the faultless style of its poets; for its delightful cameos—precious stones or shells carved in colored relief; for its blue or green faience, its skillfully glazed pottery, its delicately designed and many-colored glass. The Portland Vase, very likely a product of Alexandria, shows this art at its best: elegant figures cut into a layer of milk-white glass superimposed upon a body of blue glass; this is, so to speak, the Josiah Wedgwood masterpiece of antiquity.*
Music remained popular in all classes of the population. Scales and modes changed in the direction of refinement and novelty;1 transient discords were admitted int
o harmony; instruments and compositions increased in complexity.2 Towards 240, at Alexandria, the old “pipes of Pan” were enlarged into an organ of bronze pipes; and about 175 Ctesibius improved this into an organ operated by a combination of water and air and enabling the player to control vast waves of sound. We know nothing more of its construction; but we shall see how rapidly it developed, in Roman days, into the organ of Christian and modern times.3 Instruments were combined into orchestras, and semisymphonic performances of purely instrumental music, sometimes in five movements, were given in the theaters of Alexandria, Athens, and Syracuse.4 Professional virtuosos rose to great prominence, and to a social standing commensurate with their high fees. About 318 Aristoxenus of Taras, a pupil of Aristotle, wrote a small treatise, Harmonics, which became the classic ancient text in musical theory. Aristoxenus was a very serious man, and like most philosophers he did not enjoy the music of his time. Athenaeus represents him as saying, in words that many generations have heard: “We also, since the theaters have become completely barbarized, and since music has become utterly ruined and vulgar—we, being but a few, will recall to our minds, sitting by ourselves, what music used to be.”5
The architecture of the Hellenistic age cannot impress us, for time has leveled it away with indiscriminate hostility. And yet we know, from literature and the remains, that the Greek building art spread its sway in this period from Bactria to Spain. The mutual influence of Greece and the Orient brought in a mixture of styles: the colonnade and the architrave invaded inner Asia, while the arch, the vault, and the cupola entered the West; even so ancient an Hellenic center as Delos raised Egyptian and Persian capitals. The Doric order seemed too stern and stiff for an age that loved refinement and ornament; it gave ground city by city, while the ornate Corinthian style advanced to its highest excellence. The secularization of art kept pace with the secularization of government, law, morals, letters, and philosophy; stoas, porticoes, market places, courts, assembly rooms, libraries, theaters, gymnasiums, and baths began to crowd out the temples, and regal or private palaces gave a new outlet to Greek design and decoration. Domestic interiors were adorned with paintings, statues, and wall reliefs. Private gardens surrounded the more palatial homes. Royal parks, gardens, lakes, and pavilions were built in the capitals, and were usually opened to public use. Town planning developed as a sister art to architecture; streets were laid out on Hippodamus’ rectangular scheme, with main avenues as wide as thirty feet—an ample width for horse-and-chariot days. Smyrna boasted of paved thoroughfares,6 but presumably most Hellenistic streets were trampled dirt, and knew all the vicissitudes of mud.