The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  Philip heard him politely, and became for a moment the idol of Greece. But his treaty with Hannibal, if we may believe the too patriotic Livy, specified that in return for Philip’s attack upon Italy, Carthage, if successful in the present war, would help Philip to subdue all mainland Greece to Macedonia.10 Perhaps because the terms of such an agreement became known to the Greek states, most of them, including Agelaus’ Aetolian League, entered into a pact with Rome against Macedon, and kept Philip so harassed at home that his invasion of Italy was indefinitely postponed. In 205 Rome signed a treaty with Philip so that she might give all her attention to Hannibal, and three years later the elder Scipio overwhelmed the Carthaginian at Zama. As the last great century of Greek civilization came to an end Egypt, Rhodes, and Pergamum appealed to Rome for help against Philip. Rome responded by inviting the Second Macedonian War. Opposed by nearly all of Greece as well as by Rome, Philip fought with the ferocity of a beast at bay. He used every treachery, stole whatever he found to his purpose, and treated captives with such cruelty that every man in Abydos, when Philip’s siege was proving irresistible, killed his wife and children and then himself.11 In 197 Titus Quinctius Flamininus, a patrician of the type that made Polybius a pro-Roman enthusiast, so overwhelmed Philip at Cynoscephalae that suddenly all Macedonia—indeed, all Greece—lay at the mercy of Rome. To the disgust of his Aetolian allies (who claimed that they had won the battle), Flamininus, after exacting severe indemnities and appropriating a shipload of spoils, allowed the safely weakened Philip to keep his throne, on the ground that Macedonia was needed as a bulwark against the barbarians in the north.

  The Roman general had learned Greek at Tarentum (as Rome called Taras), and had known the fascination of Greek literature, philosophy, and art. It was apparently his sincere resolve to liberate the Greek city-states from Macedonian domination, and to give them every opportunity to live in freedom and peace. Having with some difficulty convinced the Roman commissioners that this was a wise policy, he went to the Isthmian games at Corinth (196), where all the important Greek world was gathered (each man telling the next, says Polybius, what the Romans would do now), and announced through a herald: “The Senate of Rome, and Titus Quinctius the proconsul, having overcome King Philip and the Macedonians, leave the following people free, without garrisons, subject to no tribute, and governed by their own laws: the Corinthians, Phocians, Locrians, Euboeans, Phthiotic Achaeans, Magnesians, Thessalians, and Perrhaebians”—i.e., all those mainland Greeks who were not already free. The greater part of the assemblage, unable to credit so unprecedented an act of liberality, cried out that the announcement should be repeated. When the herald read it again, “such a mighty burst of cheering arose,” says Polybius, “that those who listen to the tale today cannot easily conceive what it was.”12 Many doubted the sincerity of the declaration, and looked for a trick behind it; but Flamininus that day began the removal of Roman troops from Corinth, and by 194 his entire army was back in Italy. Greece hailed him as “Savior and Liberator,” and entered happily upon its last days of freedom.

  III. ROME THE CONQUEROR

  The Aetolians were not satisfied with these arrangements. Some of the cities that Rome had freed had once been under Aetolian domination, and were not now restored to the League. The Second Macedonian War was hardly over when the Aetolians invited Antiochus III to rescue Greece from Rome. Pergamum and Lampsacus, caught between the restless Gauls on the north and the expanding Seleucid power on the south, appealed to Rome for help against Antiochus. The Senate sent its ablest general, Publius Scipio Africanus, victor of Zama. With a few legions and the troops of Eumenes II, the Roman generals defeated Antiochus at Magnesia, and turning northward, drove back the Gauls. The Romans extended their protection over nearly all the Mediterranean coast of Asia, and then returned to Italy. Eumenes was grateful, but mainland Greece denounced him as a traitor to Hellas for calling in the barbarous Romans against his fellow Greeks.

  For fickle Greece already regretted that she had ever accepted the favors of her rude rescuer from the west. It was observed that though Flamininus and his successors had given Greece freedom, they had taken in payment—from any city that had supported Philip or Antiochus or the Aetolians—so much booty that the Greeks dreaded another such liberation. For three days, in Flamininus’ triumph, the spoils of his Grecian campaign passed in continuous train before the eyes of Rome: on the first day arms, armor, and innumerable statues of marble or bronze; on the second day 18,000 pounds of silver, 3,714 pounds of gold, and 100,000 silver coins; on the third day 114 coronets.13 Moreover, the Romans had supported, and now through their representatives continued actively to support, the moneyed classes in Greece against the poorer citizens, and had forbidden all manifestations of class war. The Greeks did not want peace at such a price; they wished to be free to settle their own disputes, and to give play to national territorial ambitions; they could not bear changelessness. Soon the rival leagues were at odds, and faction ran rife everywhere. Each city or group laid conflicting claims before the Roman Senate; the Senate dispatched commissions to investigate and adjudicate; the Greeks denounced this interference as vassalage. The chains of foreign control were invisible but real; year after year the Greeks—all but the rich—felt them more sharply, and prayed for an end to this freedom. The Senate began to listen to those of its members who contended that there would never be order or quiet in Greece until Rome took full control.

  In 179 Philip V died, and his eldest son Perseus, not without bloodshed, inherited his throne. Seventeen years of peace had restored the economy of Macedon, and had raised up a fresh generation of youths for the jaws of war. Perseus negotiated an alliance with Seleucus IV, and married Seleucus’ daughter; Rhodes joined the alliance, and sent a great fleet to escort the bride. All Greece rejoiced, and saw in Perseus a living hope against the power of Rome. Eumenes II, fearful for the independence of Pergamum, journeyed to Rome and urged the Senate, for its own sake, to destroy Macedon. On his way home he was almost killed in a private quarrel. It suited Rome to interpret the brawl as a plot of Perseus to assassinate the king; and a patriotic exchange of diplomatic recriminations announced the Third Macedonian War. Only Epirus and Illyria had the courage to help Perseus; the Greek states sent him secret letters of sympathy, but did nothing. In 168 Aemilius Paulus annihilated the Macedonian army at Pydna, destroyed seventy Macedonian cities, banished their upper classes to Italy, and quartered the kingdom into four autonomous but tributary republics, among which all trade and intercourse were forbidden. Perseus was imprisoned in Italy, and died of maltreatment in two years. Epirus was devastated, and 100,000 Epirots were sold into slavery at a dollar a head.14 Rhodes, which had played no active part in the war, was punished by the liberation of her possessions on the Asiatic coast, and by the establishment of a competitive and free port at Delos. The private papers of Perseus were captured, and all Greeks who had offered him aid or comfort were banished or jailed. A thousand of the Achaean League’s most prominent representatives, including Polybius, were deported to Italy; they remained in exile there for sixteen years, during which seven hundred of them died. The admiration of Greece for Rome the liberator had never been so intense as was now the Greek hatred of Rome the conqueror.

  The severity of the victors had unwilled results. The weakening of Rhodes ended her policing of the Aegean, and revived a trade-destroying piracy. The removal of so many aristocrats left the field open to radical leadership in the cities of the Achaean League, and the class war enjoyed one of its bitterest periods. The rich clung to the protection of Rome, the poor demanded the expulsion both of the rich and of the Roman power. In 150 the surviving Achaean exiles returned from Italy, and joined in the demand for the repudiation of Roman authority in Greece. To weaken the Achaean power Rome sent to Greece a commission that ordered Corinth, Orchomenos, and Argos to secede from the League. The ladies of Corinth replied by emptying pails of refuse upon the heads of the commissioners.15 In 146 the League voted for a war of
liberation, hoping that Rome’s campaigns in Spain and Africa would divert her energies and incline her to a complaisant peace. A fever of patriotism swept the cities of the League. Slaves were freed and armed, a moratorium on debts was proclaimed, and land was promised to the poor, while the unhappy rich, trembling between socialism and Rome, reluctantly contributed their jewelry and their money to the cause of freedom. Athens and Sparta remained aloof, but Boeotia, Locria, and Euboea committed themselves bravely to the war. The republics of Macedonia joined in open revolt against Rome.

  The angry Senate sent over an army under Mummius and a fleet under Metellus. Their combined forces overcame all resistance, and in 146 Mummius captured Corinth, the citadel of the League. Whether to destroy a commercial rival in the east as the younger Scipio was in that year destroying Carthage in the west, or to give rebellious Greece a lesson after the fashion of Alexander at Thebes, the rich city of merchants and courtesans was put to the flames, all the men were slaughtered, and all the women and children were sold into slavery. Mummius carried off to Italy whatever wealth could be moved, including the works of art with which the Corinthians had adorned their cities and their homes. Polybius tells how Roman soldiers used world-famous paintings as boards for their games of draughts or dice. The League was dissolved, and its leaders were put to death. Greece and Macedonia were united into one province under a Roman governor. Boeotia, Locris, Corinth, and Euboea were subjected to annual tribute; Athens and Sparta were spared, and were allowed to remain under their own laws. The party of property and order was upheld everywhere, and all attempts to wage war, or make revolutions, or change the constitution, were proscribed. The turbulent cities had at last found peace.

  EPILOGUE

  Our Greek Heritage

  GREEK civilization was not dead; it had yet several centuries of life before it; and when it died* it bequeathed itself in an incomparable legacy to the nations of Europe and the Near East. Every Greek colony poured the elixir of Greek art and thought into the cultural blood of the hinterland—into Spain and Gaul, Etruria and Rome, Egypt and Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor, and along the shores of the Black Sea. Alexandria was the port of reshipment for ideas as well as goods: from the Museum and the Library the works and views of Greek poets, mystics, philosophers, and scientists were scattered through scholars and students into every city of the Mediterranean concourse. Rome took the Greek heritage in its Hellenistic form: her playwrights adopted Menander and Philemon, her poets imitated the modes, measures, and themes of Alexandrian literature, her arts used Greek craftsmen and Greek forms, her law absorbed the statutes of the Greek cities, and her later imperial organization was modeled upon the Greco-Oriental monarchies: Hellenism, after the Roman conquest of Greece, conquered Rome even as the Orient was conquering Greece. Every extension of Roman power spread the ferment of Hellenic civilization. The Byzantine Empire wedded Greek to Asiatic culture, and passed on some part of the Greek inheritance to the Near East and the Slavic north. The Syrian Christians took up the torch and handed it to the Arabs, who carried it through Africa to Spain. Byzantine, Moslem, and Jewish scholars conveyed or translated the Greek masterpieces to Italy, arousing first the philosophy of the Schoolmen and then the fever of the Renaissance. Since that second birth of the European mind the spirit of Greece has seeped so thoroughly into modern culture that “all civilized nations, in all that concerns the activity of the intellect, are colonies of Hellas” today.†1

  If we include in our Hellenic heritage not only what the Greeks invented but what they adapted from older cultures and transmitted by these diverse routes to our own, we shall find that patrimony in almost every phase of modern life. Our handicrafts, the technique of mining, the essentials of engineering, the processes of finance and trade, the organization of labor, the governmental regulation of commerce and industry—all these have come down to us on the stream of history from Rome, and through Rome from Greece. Our democracies and our dictatorships alike go back to Greek exemplars; and though the widened reach of states has evolved a representative system unknown to Hellas, the democratic idea of a government responsible to the governed, of trial by jury, and of civil liberties of thought, speech, writing, assemblage, and worship, have been profoundly stimulated by Greek history. These things above all distinguished the Greek from the Oriental, and gave him an independence of spirit and enterprise that made him smile at the obeisances and inertia of the East.

  Our schools and universities, our gymnasiums and stadiums, our athletics and Olympic games, trace their lineage to Greece. The theory of eugenic mating, the conception of self-containment and of self-control, the cult of health and natural living, the pagan ideal of a shameless enjoyment of every sense, found their historic formulations in Greece. Christian theology and practice (the very words are Greek) stem in large part from the mystery religions of Greece and Egypt, from Eleusinian, Orphic, and Osirian rites; from Greek doctrines of the divine son dying for mankind and rising from the dead; from Greek rituals of religious procession, ceremonial purification, holy sacrifice, and the sacred common meal; from Greek ideas of hell demons, purgatory, indulgences, and heaven; and from Stoic and Neo-Platonic theories of the Logos, creation, and the final conflagration of the world. Even our superstition is indebted to Greek bogies, witches, curses, omens, and unlucky days. And who could understand English literature, or one ode of Keats, without some tincture of Greek mythology?

  Our literature could hardly have existed without the Greek tradition. Our alphabet came from Greece through Cumae and Rome; our language is littered with Greek words; our science has forged an international language through Greek terms; our grammar and rhetoric, even the punctuation and paragraphing of this page, are Greek inventions. Our literary genres are Greek—the lyric, the ode, the idyl, the novel, the essay, the oration, the biography, the history, and above all the drama; again nearly all the words are Greek. The terms and forms of the modern drama—tragedy, comedy, and pantomime—are Greek; and though Elizabethan tragedy is unique, the comic drama has come down almost unchanged from Menander and Philemon through Plautus and Terence, Ben Jonson and Moliere. The Greek dramas themselves are among the richest portions of our inheritance.

  Nothing else in Greece seems so foreign to us as its music; and yet modern music (until its return to Africa and the Orient) was derived from medieval chants and dances, and these went back in part to Greece. The oratorio and the opera owe something to the Greek choral dance and drama; and the theory of music, so far as we know, was first explored and expounded by the Greeks from Pythagoras to Aristoxenus. Our debt is least in painting; but in the art of fresco a direct line can be traced from Polygnotus through Alexandria and Pompeii, Giotto and Michelangelo, to the arresting murals of our own day. The forms and much of the technique of modern sculpture are still Greek, for upon no other art has the Hellenic genius stamped itself so despotically. We are only now freeing ourselves from the fascination of Greek architecture; every city in Europe and America has some temple of commerce or finance whose form or columnar façade came from the shrines of Greek gods. We miss in Greek art the study of character and the portrayal of the soul, and its infatuation with physical beauty and health leaves it less mature than the masculine statuary of Egypt or the profound painting of the Chinese; but the lessons of moderation, purity, and harmony embodied in the sculpture and architecture of the classic age are a precious heirloom for our race.

  If Greek civilization seems more akin and “modern” to us now than that of any century before Voltaire, it is because the Hellene loved reason as much as form, and boldly sought to explain all nature in nature’s terms. The liberation of science from theology, and the independent development of scientific research, were parts of the heady adventure of the Greek mind. Greek mathematicians laid the foundations of trigonometry and calculus, they began and completed the study of conic sections, and they brought three-dimensional geometry to such relative perfection that it remained as they left it until Descartes and Pascal. Democritu
s illuminated the whole area of physics and chemistry with his atomic theory. In a mere aside and holiday from abstract studies Archimedes produced enough new mechanisms to place his name with the highest in the records of invention. Aristarchus anticipated and perhaps inspired Copernicus;* and Hipparchus, through Claudius Ptolemy, constructed a system of astronomy which is one of the landmarks in cultural history. Eratosthenes measured the earth and mapped it. Anaxagoras and Empedocles drew the outlines of a theory of evolution. Aristotle and Theophrastus classified the animal and plant kingdoms, and almost created the sciences of meteorology, zoology, embryology, and botany. Hippocrates freed medicine from mysticism and philosophical theory, and ennobled it with an ethical code; Herophilus and Erasistratus raised anatomy and physiology to a point which, except in Galen, Europe would not reach again till the Renaissance. In the work of these men we breathe the quiet air of reason, always uncertain and unsafe, but cleansed of passion and myth. Perhaps, if we had its masterpieces entire, we should rate Greek science as the most signal intellectual achievement of mankind.