by Will Durant
* The figure is Gomme’s, I.e. Possibly the number was much greater: Suidas, on the authority of a speech uncertainly attributed to Hypereides in 338, gives the number of adult male slaves alone as 150,000;37 and according to the unreliable Athenaeus the census of Attica by Demetrius Phalereus about 317 gave 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics and freedmen, and 400,000 slaves. Timaeus about 300 reckoned the slaves of Corinth at 460,000, and Aristotle, about 340, those of Aegina at 470,000.38 Perhaps these high figures are due to including slaves transiently offered for sale in the slave marts of Corinth, Aegina, and Athens.
* The great fortunes of Greek antiquity were of course modest in amount by modern standards. Callias, the wealthiest of the Athenians, is said to have had two hundred talents ($1,200,000); Nicias, one hundred.52
* The sculptors and architects of Greece formed a guild of builders, with their own religious mysteries, and became the forerunners of the Freemasons of later Europe.60
* We have no evidence of contraceptive devices among the Greeks.4
* In one of the pictures at Pompeii, probably copied from the Greek, we see a pupil supported upon the shoulders of another, and held at his heels by a third, while the teacher flogs him.13
† This institution, however, cannot yet be traced back beyond 336 B.C.
* Plutarch tells a pretty story of how an epidemic of suicide among the women of Miletus was suddenly and completely ended by an ordinance decreeing that self-slain women should be carried naked through the marketplace to their burial.21
* Cf. Antigone, 781f.:
When Love disputes
He carries his battles!
Love, he loots
The rich of their chattels!
By delicate cheeks
On maiden’s pillow
Watches he all the night-time long;
His prey he seeks
Over the billow,
Pastoral haunts he preys among.
Gods are deathless, and they
Cannot elude his whim;
And oh, amid us whose life’s a day,
Mad is the heart that broodeth him!92a
* This consisted in throwing liquid from a cup so that it would strike some small object placed at a distance.
* It was the custom among the Greeks to carry small change in the mouth.
* Philokaloumen met’ euteleias, says Thucydides’ Pericles: “We love beauty without extravagance.”2
* “Among the ancients,” said Stendhal, “the beautiful is only the high relief of the useful.”4
* He repaid Cimon by making love to his sister Elpinice, and painting her portrait as Laodicea among the women of Troy.11
* A block of marble discovered in Rome in 1887 when the Villa Ludovisi was torn down. The original is in the Museo delle Terme in Rome; there is a good copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
* A method of indicating the depth to which, at various points, a block of sculptural material is to be cut by a carver before the artist takes it in hand. This process came into use in Hellenistic Greece.26
* In the Capitoline Museum, Rome; probably a copy of a fifth-century Greek original
† In the Athens Museum; reproduced in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
* We have perhaps an echo of its majesty in the noble head of Juno in the British Museum, reputed to be a copy from Polycleitus.
† Perhaps an Amazon in the Vatican is a Roman copy of this work.
* The Museo delle Terme has the torso of a fine marble copy by a Roman artist. The Munich Antiquarium has a late copy in bronze; the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a copy uniting the Vatican torso with the head from the Palazzo Lancelotti.
† There is a good copy of the Lateran copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
* The Nike was pieced together from fragments unearthed by the Germans at Olympia in 1890, and is now in the Olympia Museum.—Almost as beautiful are the Nereids, or Sea Maidens, which were found headless among the ruins of a monument in Lycian Xanthus, and are now in the British Museum. The Greek spirit had penetrated even into non-Greek Asia.
* No authentic copy remains.
† It was carried off to Constantinople about A.D. 330, and appears to have been destroyed in a riot there in 1203.31
‡ If we may judge from the “Lenormant” and “Varvaka” models of this statue that are preserved in the Athens Museum, we should not have cared much for the Athene Parthenos. The first has a stout frame and a swollen face, and the breast of the second is crawling with sacred snakes.
§ Ca. 438. There is much uncertainty about the date, and about the sequence of events in the later years of Pheidias’ life.33
* Nothing remains of this Zeus but fragments of the pedestal.
† A Draped Venus in the Louvre may be a copy of this statue.
* Thirty-eight of the columns remain, the walls of the naos, and parts of the inner colonnade. Fragments of the frieze are in the British Museum.
† Now in the Olympia Museum.
* The name is a mistake, since this temple, erected in 425, could not have been the Theseum to which, in 469, Cimon brought the supposed bones of Theseus; but time sanctifies error as well as theft, and the traditional name is commonly retained for lack of a certain designation.
† The Theseum is the best preserved of all ancient Greek buildings; even so it lacks its marble tiles, its murals, its interior statuary, its pedimental sculptures, and nearly all of its external coloring. The metopes are so badly damaged that their reliefs are almost undistinguishable.
* Statues of Nike, or Victory, were often made without wings, so that she might not be able to abandon the city. The temple was pulled down by the Turks in A.D. 1687 to make a fortress. Lord Elgin rescued some slabs of the frieze and sent them to the British Museum. In 1835 the stones of the temple were put together again; the restored building was replaced on the original site, and terra-cotta casts were substituted for the missing parts of the badly damaged frieze.
* These columns, rather than those of the Parthenon, set the style for later architecture. The foot of each was modulated into the stylobate by an “Attic base” of three members, articulated by fillets or bands. The top of the column was graduated into the voluted capital by a band of flowers. The entablature had a richly decorated molding, a frieze of black stone, and, under the cornice, a series of reliefs. The egg-and-dart and honeysuckle ornament of the molding was as carefully carved as the sculpture; the artists were paid as much for a foot of such molding as for a figure in the frieze.48
† This term was applied to the figures by the Roman architect Vitruvius, from the name given to the priestesses of Artemis at Caryae in Laconia. The Athenians called them simply korai, or Maidens.
* The naming of the Parthenon figures is mostly conjectural.
* The Parthenon, like the Erechtheum and the Theseum, was preserved through its use as a Christian church; it needed no great change of name, being in each case dedicated to the Virgin. After the Turkish occupation in 1456 it was transformed into a mosque, and acquired a minaret. In 1687, when the Venetians besieged Athens, the Turks used the temple to store each day’s supply of powder for their artillery. The Venetian commander, so informed, ordered his gunners to fire upon the Parthenon. A shell pierced the roof, exploded the powder, and laid half the building in ruins. After capturing the city Morosini tried also to take the pediment statuary, but his workmen dropped and smashed the figures in lowering them. In 1800 Lord Elgin, British ambassador to Turkey, secured permission to remove a part of the sculptures to the British Museum, on the ground that they would be safer there than at Athens against weather and war. His spoils included twelve statues, fifteen metopes, and fifty-six slabs of the frieze. The Museum’s expert on sculpture advised against buying this material; it was only after ten years of negotiations that the Museum agreed to pay $175,000 for them, which was less than half what Lord Elgin had spent in securing and transporting them.53 A few years later, during the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830), th
e Acropolis was twice bombarded, and much of the Erechtheum was destroyed.54 Some metopes of the Parthenon are still in place; a few slabs of the frieze are in the Athens Museum, and a few others in the Louvre, The citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, have built a replica, of the Parthenon., in the same dimensions as the original, with like materials, and, so far as our knowledge goes, with the same decorations and coloring; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art contains a small hypothetical reproduction of the interior.
* One might also note the lack of order in the arrangement of the buildings on the Acropolis, or in the sacred enclosure at Olympia; but it is difficult to say whether this disorder was a defect of taste or an accident of history.
* On later (possibly Periclean) arithmetical notation cf. Chap. XXVIII, sect. 1, below.
* Irrational numbers are those that cannot be expressed by either a whole number or a fraction, like the square root of 2. Incommensurable quantities are those for which no third quantity can be found which bears to each of them a relation expressible by a rational number, like the side and diagonal of a square, or the radius and circumference of a circle.
† A moonlike figure made by the arcs of two intersecting circles.
* This is the Vortex that Aristophanes, in The Clouds, so effectively satirized as Socrates’ substitute for Zeus.
* Ca. 434.30 Another account places the trial in 450.31
† According to a rival story he was imprisoned at Athens, and was awaiting the fatal cup when Pericles arranged his escape.32
‡ Herodotus remarks on the superior calendar of the Egyptians.37 From Egypt the Greeks took the gnomon, or sundial, and from Asia the clepsydra, or water clock, as their instruments for measuring time.
* The oath is regarded as deriving from the Hippocratic school rather than from the master himself; but Erotian, writing in the first century A.D., attributes it to Hippocrates.75
* The Hindus had seen the problem long before, and were to remain Parmenideans to the end; perhaps the antisensationism of the Upanishads had penetrated through Ionia or Pythagoras to Parmenides.
† This strains the imagination; but almost in Parmenidean fashion we speak of a table as at rest though it is composed (we are told) of the most excitably mobile “electrons.” Parmenides saw the world as we see the table; the electron would see the table as we see the world.
* The discussion of these paradoxes has gone on from Plato6 to Bertrand Russell,7 and may continue as long as words are mistaken for things. The assumptions that invalidate the puzzles are that “infinite” is a thing instead of merely a word indicating the inability of the mind to conceive an absolute end; and that time, space, and motion are discontinuous, i.e., are composed of separate points or parts.
* “To the wise and good man,” he writes, “the whole earth is his fatherland.”21
* Lucretius attributes a kind of psychophysical parallelism to “the great Democritus,” who laid it down that the atoms of body and the atoms of mind are placed one beside one alternately in pairs, and so link the frame together.”39
* Perhaps Plato poached here for Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium.
* These probably occurred in 451-45, 432, 422, and 415.85
* These propositions, aiming to discredit the transcendentalism of Parmenides, meant: (1) Nothing exists beyond the senses; (2) if anything existed beyond the senses it would be unknowable, for all knowledge comes through the senses; (3) if anything suprasensual were knowable, the knowledge of it would be incommunicable, since all communication is through the senses.
* So in Book III of the Memorabilia Socrates is made to expound the principles of military Strategy.
* “So far as drinking is concerned,” Xenophon makes Socrates say, “wine does of a truth ’moisten the soul and lull our griefs to sleep. . . . But I suspect that men’s bodies fare like those of plants. . . . When God gives the plants water in floods to drink they cannot stand up straight or let the breezes blow through them; but when they drink only as much as they enjoy they grow up straight and tall, and come to full and abundant fruitage.”134
* De anexetastos bios ou biotos anthropo.—Plato, Apology, 37.
* Possibly, as Plutarch and Athenaeus assure us, Anytus loved Alcibiades, who rejected him for Socrates.164
* A notable exception is Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast.
* Music continued to play a central role in the culture of the classic period (480-323). The great name among the fifth-century composers was Timotheus of Miletus; he wrote nomes in which the music dominated the poetry, and represented a story and an action. His extension of the Greek lyre to eleven strings, and his experiments in complex and elaborate styles, provoked the conservatives of Athens to such denunciation that Timotheus, we are told, was about to take his own life when Euripides comforted him, collaborated with him, and correctly prophesied that all Greece would soon be at his feet.25
* There were a few dramas about later history; of these the only extant example is Aeschylus’ Persian Women. About 493 Phrynichus presented The Fall of Miletus; but the Athenians were so moved to grief by contemplating the capture of their daughter city by the Persians that they fined Phrynichus a thousand drachmas for his innovation, and forbade any repetition of the play.39 There are some indications that Themistocles had secretly arranged for the performance as a means of stirring up the Athenians to active war against Persia.40
* Though in Aeschylus the actors were only two, the roles they played in a drama were limited only in the sense that no more than two characters could be on the stage at once. The leader of the chorus was sometimes individualized into a third actor. Minor charactersattendants, soldiers, etc.—were not counted as actors.
* The Suppliant Women is of the primitive type, in which the chorus predominates; The Persians is also mostly choral, and vividly describes the battle of Salamis; the Seven against Thebes was the third play in a trilogy that told the story of King Laius and his queen Jocasta, the patricide and incest of their son Oedipus, and the conflict between the sons of Oedipus for the Theban throne.
* Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone were produced separately.
* Theseus.
* The major plays appeared in approximately the following order: Alcestis, 438; Medea, 431; Hippolytus, 428; Andromache, 427; Hecuba, ca. 425; Electra, ca. 416; The Trojan Women, 415; Iphigenia in Tauris, ca. 413; Orestes, 408; Iphigenia in Aulis, 406; The Bacchae, 406.
* It was presented in 438 as the fourth play in a group by Euripides; perhaps it was intended as a half-serious satyr play rather than as a half-comic tragedy. In Balaustion’s Adventure Browning, with generous simplicity, has taken the play at its face value.
* There had already been royal or state libraries in Greece, as we have seen; and such collections in Egypt can be traced back to the Fourth Dynasty. A Greek library consisted of scrolls arranged in pigeonholes in a chest. Publication meant that an author had allowed his manuscript to be copied, and the copies to be circulated; thereafter further copies could be made without permission or “copyright.” Copies of popular works were numerous, and not costly; Plato tells us in the Apology that Anaxagoras’ treatise On Nature could be bought for a drachma ($1). Athens, in the age of Euripides, became the chief center of the book trade in Greece.
* Possibly a reference to the repetition of Aeschylus’ plays.
* Some of the gods, he tells us, keep brothels in heaven.135
* Cf. the imaginative but excellent discussion of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, in iii, 80-2.
* E.g., the speech of Alcibiades at Sparta, vi, 20.89.
* The theater was probably built under Hieron I (478-67), and rebuilt under Hieron II (270-16). Much of it survives; and many ancient Greek dramas have been staged in it in our century.
* Cf. Lucretius’ powerful description of this plague in De Rerum Natura, vi, 1138-1286.
* The term strategos was applied to naval as well as military commanders.
* Critias and Alcibiades had left
the tutelage of Socrates early in his career as a teacher, not liking the restraints which he preached to them.34
* Croiset believed that the real cause of the indictment was the hostility of the Attic peasantry to anyone who cast doubt upon the state gods. One of the chief markets for cattle was provided by the pious who bought the animals to offer in sacrifice; any decrease in faith would lessen this market. Aristophanes, in this interpretation, was the mouthpiece of these peasants, before whom his plays, if successful, would be repeated.36
* Grote54 doubts them, and they are rendered dubious by the efforts of Plato and Xenophon to defend Socrates’ reputation. But these accounts were generally accepted in antiquity (e.g., by Tertullian and Augustine55), and accord admirably with the habits of the Athenians.
* The homoioi, or Equals, numbered eight thousand in 480, two thousand in 371, seven hundred in 341.2
* “In what respect,” he asked, “is the ‘Great King’ greater than I, unless he is more upright and self-restrained?”5
* “Now that a certain portion of mankind,” says Plato (Laws, 948), “do not believe at all in the existence of the gods . . . a rational legislation ought to do away with the oaths of the parties on either side.”
* On a similar use of olive oil in our own time, cf. Himes, Medical History of Contraception, 80.
* When he condemned the Pythagorean Phintias (less correctly Pythias) to death for conspiracy, Phintias asked leave to go home for a day to settle his affairs. His friend Damon (not the music master of Pericles and Socrates) offered himself as hostage, and volunteered to suffer death in case Phintias should not return. Phintias returned; and Dionysius, as surprised as Napoleon at any sincere friendship, pardoned Phintias, and begged to be admitted into so steadfast a comradeship.42
† A bireme was a galley with two banks or decks of oars; a trireme, quadrireme, or quinquereme probably had not three, four, or five banks of oars, but so many men on each bench, handling so many oars through one oarlock or port.