The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  * The theoric (i.e., spectacle) fund had now been extended to so many festivals as almost to pauperize a large part of the citizenry. “The Athenian Republic,” says Glotz, “had become a mutual benefit society, demanding from one class the wherewithal to support another.”56 The Assembly had made it a capital crime to propose any diversion of this fund to other purposes.

  * Who was suspected of having urged on Pausanias.

  * E.g., Isocrates—and most Greek writers after him—counted it a literary sin to end one word, and begin the next, with a vowel.

  † So named because addressed to the panegyris, or General Assembly (pan-agora) of the Greeks, at the hundredth Olympiad.

  * Thrasybulus, Anytus, and the other restorers of democracy in 404.

  * Cicero, Milton, Massillon, Jeremy Taylor, and Edmund Burke formed their prose style upon the balanced clauses and long periods of Isocrates.

  † The enlightened dictator who had imported Greek culture into Cyprus, 410-387.

  * Now in the British Museum.

  * A Roman copy in the Vatican corresponds to the representation of the statue on exhumed Cnidian coins.

  † Nero had it brought to Rome, where it perished in the conflagration of A.D. 64. The Vatican Cupid of Centocelle may be a copy.

  * Other artists, said Lysippus, in a sentence that would have pleased Manet, made men as they were, while he made them “as they appeared?.”43

  * This lovely head, which has been used as symbol and first illustration for this volume, was stolen from the little museum at Tegea, and, after nine years’ search, was found in a granary in a village of Arcadia by Alexandre Philadelpheus, the gracious curator of the National Museum at Athens. Both the subject and the period are uncertain; but the Praxitelean style seem to date it in the fourth century. M. Philadelpheus considers it “the pearl of the National Museum.”

  * The Greeks defined conic sections as the figures—ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola—produced by cutting an acute-angled, a right-angled, and an obtuse-angled cone with a plane perpendicular to an element.7 Modern mathematics adds the cirqle and intersecting lines.

  † The tetrahedron (pyramid), hexahedron (cube), octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron—convex solids enclosed by four, six, eight, twelve, or twenty regular polygons.

  ‡ The Royal Roads, or King’s Highways, usually referred to the great roads of the Persian Empire. The story is told also of Euclid and Ptolemy I.8a

  § One of his favorite problems was to find the “golden section”—i.e., to divide a line at such a point that the whole line should have the same proportion to the larger part as the larger to the smaller.

  * The synodic period of a heavenly body is the time between two successive conjunctions of it with the sun, as seen from the earth; the zodiacal period is the time between two successive appearances of a heavenly body in the same part of the sky as imaginatively divided into the twelve signs of the zodiac. Eudoxus’ figure for the synodic period of Saturn was 390 days, ours is 378; for Jupiter, 390, ours 399; for Mars, 260, ours 780; for Mercury, no (one manuscript says 116), ours 116; for Venus, 570, ours 584. The zodiacal period given by Eudoxus for Saturn was 30 years, our figure, 29 years, 166 days; for Jupiter, 12 years, our figure, 11 years, 315 days; for Mars, 2 years, our figure, I year, 322 days; for Mercury and Venus, I year, our figure. I year.11

  * Those who omit philosophy from their education, said Aristippus, “are like the suitors of Penelope; they . . . find it easier to win over the maidservants than to marry the mistress.”30

  * It was not the first university: the Pythagorean school of Crotona, as far back as 520, had offered a variety of courses to a united scholastic community; and the school of Isocrates antedated the Academy by eight years.

  * Certain passages in Aristotle suggest a different understanding of Plato—especially of the theory of Ideas—than that which we get from the Dialogues.

  † The thirty-six Dialogues cannot be dated or authoritatively classified. We may arbitrarily divide them into (1) an early group—chiefly the Apology, Crito, Lysis, Ion, Charmides, Cratylus, Euthyphro, and Euthydemus; (2) a middle group—chiefly Gorgias, Protagoras, Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Republic; and (3) a later group—chiefly Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, and Laws. The first group was probably composed before the age of thirty-four, the second before forty, the third after sixty, the interval being devoted to the Academy.76

  * In his later years Plato tried to prove the Pythagorean converse, that all Ideas are mathematical forms.86

  † Cf. Carrel: “For modern scientists, as for Plato, Ideas are the sole reality.”89 Cf. Spinoza: “I do not understand, by the series of causes and real entities, a series of individual mutable things, but rather the series of fixed and eternal things. For it would be impossible for human weakness to follow up the series of individual mutable things, not only because their number surpasses all counting, but because . . . the existence of particular things has no connection with their essence, and is not an eternal truth.” (In order that the geometry of triangles may be true, it is not necessary that any particular triangle should exist.) “However, there is no need that we should understand the series of individual mutable things, for their essence . . . is only to be found in fixed and eternal things, and from the laws inscribed in those things as their true codes, according to which all individual things are made and arranged.”90 Note that in Plato’s theory of Ideas Heracleitus and Parmenides are reconciled: Heracleitus is right, and flux is true, in the world of sense; Parmenides is right, and changeless unity is true, in the world of Ideas.

  * How much of this Hindu-Pythagorean-Orphic doctrine of immortality was protective coloration it is hard to say. Plato presents it half playfully, as if it were merely a useful myth, a poetic aid to decency.100

  * I.e., Plato concludes that a natural ethic is inadequate.

  * The most important of the extant treatises may be arranged under six heads:

  I. LOGIC: Categories, Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophist Reasonings.

  II. SCIENCE:

  1. Natural Science: Physics, Mechanics, On the Heavens, Meteorology.

  2. Biology: History of Animals, Parts of Animals, Movements of Animals, Locomotion of Animals, Reproduction of Animals.

  3. Psychology: On the Soul, Little Essays on Nature.

  III. Metaphysics.

  IV. ESTHETICS: Rhetoric, Poetics.

  V. ETHICS: Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics.

  VI. POLITICS: Politics, The Constitution of Athens.

  * E.g., in the Reproduction of Animals (iv. 6.1) he refers to the regrowth of the eyes when experimentally cut out in young birds; and he rejects the theory that the right testicle produces male, and the left testicle female, offspring, by showing that a man whose right testicle had been removed had continued to have children of either sex.

  * References in the History of Animals indicate that Aristotle prepared a volume of anatomical sketches, and that some of them were reproduced on the walls of the Lyceum; his text uses letters, in modern style, to refer to various organs or points in the drawings.

  † Aristotle failed to distinguish between ovaries and uterus; but his description was not materially bettered before the work of Stensen in 1669.

  * From echo, I have—telos, my goal or purpose—en, within.

  * He was misled by the insensitivity of cerebral tissue to direct stimulus.

  † “The soul,” Aristotle adds in a startling idealistic aside, “is in a certain way all existing things; for all things are either perceptions or thoughts.”185 Having bowed to Berkeley, Aristotle also bows to Hume: “Mind is one and continuous in the sense in which the process of thinking is so; and thinking is identical with the thoughts which are its parts.”186

  * Other interpretations of Aristotle’s contradictory pronouncements on this point are possible. The text follows the Cambridge Ancient History, VI, 345; Grote, Aristotle, II, 233; and Rohde
, Psyche, 493.

  † The essential aspect of anything, in Aristotle as in Plato, is the “form” (eidos), not the matter which is formed; the matter is not the “real being,” but a negative and passive potentiality which acquires specific existence only when actuated and determined by form.

  ‡ Every effect, says Aristotle, is produced by four causes: material (the component stuff), efficient (the agent or his act), formal (the nature of the thing), and final (the goal). He gives a peculiar example: “What is the material cause of a man? The menses” (i.e., the provision of an ovum). “What is the efficient cause? The semen” (i.e., the act of insemination). “What is the formal cause? The nature” (of the agents involved). “What is the final cause? The purpose in view.”188

  * The Nicomachean Ethics (so called because edited by Aristotle’s son Nicomachus) and the Politics were originally one book. The plural title forms—ta ethika and ta politika—were used by the Greek editors to suggest the treatment of various moral and political problems; and these forms have been retained in the English adoption of the words.

  * Only one of these studies survives—the Athenaion Politeia, found in 1891. It is an admirable constitutional history of Athens.

  * Even slavery is legitimate, Aristotle thinks: as it is right that the mind should rule the body, so it is just that those who excel in intelligence should rule those who excel only in strength.216

  * Dinocrates had pleased Alexander by proposing to carve Mt. Athos—six thousand feet high—into a figure of Alexander standing waist deep in the sea, holding a city in one hand and a harbor in the other.24 The project was never carried out.

  * Lucian gives the ancient view in one of his Dialogues of the Dead: “Philip. You cannot deny that you are my son, Alexander; if you had been Ammon’s son you would not have died. Alex. I knew all the time that you were my father. I only accepted the statement of the oracle because I thought it was good policy. . . . When the barbarians thought they had a god to deal with, they gave up the struggle; which made their conquest an easy matter.”36

  * There are conflicting stories about his guilt and his death.37 He left three main works: Hellenic a, a history of Greece from 387 to 337; a History of the Sacred War, and a History of Alexander.

  † Each of them, Arrian assures us, received a talent in addition to his pay—which continued till he reached his home.38

  * Damocles, sought out everywhere by Demetrius and at last about to be captured, killed himself by plunging into a caldron of boiling water.3 We must not misjudge the Athenians from one such instance of virtue.

  * Not the Brennus who had invaded Italy in 390 B.C.

  † We have no Gallic version of these matters, nor any “barbarian” account of Greek invasions into Asia, Italy, or Sicily.

  ‡ In the following pages, to allow for the rise of prices in the Hellenistic age, the talent will be reckoned as equivalent to $3000 in the United States of 1939.

  * Perhaps it reflected and aided the Hellenistic deification of kings.

  * Perhaps because the latter had led to family limitation, as in modern France.

  * A Greek talent weighed fifty-eight pounds avoirdupois.

  * On this site Professor Leroy Waterman in 1931 exhumed tablets indicating that one of the richest citizens of Seleucia had avoided the payment of taxes for twenty-five years.1

  * Usually but uncertainly interpreted as “The Hammer.”

  † The anniversary of this Rededication (Hanukkah) is still celebrated in nearly every Jewish home.

  * Ptolemy Philadelphus had the sarcophagus removed to Alexandria. Ptolemy Cocces melted down the gold for his use, and exposed the mortal remains of Alexander in a glass coffin.1

  * See Chap. XXVII below.

  * Sostratus of Cnidus designed it for Ptolemy II, at a cost of eight hundred talents (about $2,400,000)22 It rose in several setbacks to a height of four hundred feet; it was covered with white marble and adorned with sculptures in marble and bronze; above the pillared cupola that contained the light rose a twenty-one-foot statue of Poseidon. The flame came from the burning of resinous wood, and was made visible, probably by convex metal mirrors, to a distance of thirty-eight miles23 The structure was completed in 279 B.C., and was destroyed in the thirteenth century A.D. The island of Pharos, on which it stood, is now the Ras-et-Tin quarter of Alexandria; the site of the lighthouse has been covered by the sea.

  * Hardly anything but a few catacombs and pillars have been preserved from ancient Alexandria. Its remains lie directly under the present capital, making excavation expensive; probably they have sunk beneath the water level; and parts of the old city have been covered by the Mediterranean.

  * The population of Alexandria in 1927 was 570,000.

  * The story was based upon a letter purporting to have been written by one Aristeas in the first century A.D. The letter was proved spurious by Hody of Oxford in 1684.45

  * The Old Testament Apocrypha (lit. hidden) are those books that were excluded from the Jewish canon of the Old Testament as uninspired, but were included in the Roman Catholic Vulgate—i.e., the Latin translation, by St. Jerome, of the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible. The chief O. T. Apocrypha are Ecclesiasticus, I and II Esdras, and I and II Maccabees. The apocalyptic (i.e., revealing) books are those that purport to contain prophetic divine revelations; such writings began to appear about 250 B.C., and continued into the Christian era. Some apocalypses, like the Book of Enoch, are considered apocryphal and uncanonical; others, like the Book of Revelation, are considered canonical.

  * Virgil copied it in form, sometimes in substance, sometimes line for line, in the Aeneid.25

  * It derives its name from the Duke of Portland, who bought it in Rome. It is now in the British Museum.

  * This mosaic, and the Achilles and Briseis, are in the Naples Museum.

  * The Statue of Liberty is one hundred and fifty-one feet high from base to torch.

  * It remained where it fell till A.D. 653, when the Saracens sold the materials. Nine hundred camels were required to remove them.17

  † The restored arm in the Vatican is the work of Bernini, well done in detail, but ruinous to the centripetal unity of the composition. Winckelmann nevertheless liked the group so well that Lessing was aroused, by reading him, to write a book of esthetic criticism around it. and occasionally about it.

  ‡ In the Demeter of the British Museum.

  * The original is lost. A Roman marble copy of the third century A.D. was found in the sixteenth century in the Baths of Caracalla, was repaired by Michelangelo, was housed for a time in the Palazzo Farnese, and is now in the Naples Museum.

  † In the Museo delle Terme at Rome.

  ‡ In the Naples Museum.

  * So called from the pavilion in the Vatican where the statue was formerly placed.

  † In the Capitoline Museum at Rome, and the Uffizi at Florence.

  ‡ In the Naples Museum.

  § It was formerly described as a dedication set up by Demetrius Poliorcetes in 305 to commemorate his defeat of Ptolemy I off Cyprian Salamis in 306; but recent discussion tends to connect it with the battle of Cos (ca. 258), in which the fleets of Macedonia, Seleucia, and Rhodes defeated Ptolemy II.22

  * Both in the Vatican.

  † In the State Museum, Berlin.

  * “There is no personal character in Greek art—abstract ideas of youth and age, strength and swiftness, virtue and vice—yes; but there is no individuality.”23 Ruskin thought only of fifth-and fourth-century Greek art, just as Winckelmann and Lessing knew chiefly the art of the Hellenistic age.

  * These papyri are not older than Alexandria; but since they use the primitive digamma to represent 6, it is probable that the alphabetical notation antedated the Hellenistic age.

  * Books I and II summarize the geometrical work of Pythagoras; Book III, Hippocrates of Chios; Book V, Eudoxus; Books IV, VI, XI, and XII, the later Pythagorean and Athenian geometricians. Books VII-X deal with higher mathematics.

  * Cic
ero saw the apparatus two centuries later, and marveled at its complex synchronism. “When Gallus moved the globe,” he writes, “it was actually true that the moon was always as many revolutions behind the sun on the bronze contrivance as would agree with the number of days it was behind it in the sky. Thus the same eclipse of the sun happened on the globe as would happen in actuality.7

  * Lucian is our earliest, and not quite reliable, authority for the story that Archimedes set Roman ships on fire by concentrating the sun’s rays upon them through the use of great concave mirrors.13

  * Aristarchus estimated the volume of the sun as three hundred (it is over a million) times that of the earth—an estimate that seems low to us, but would have astonished Anaxagoras or Epicurus. He calculated the diameter of the moon as one third that of the earth—an error of eight per cent—and our distance from the sun as twenty (it is almost four hundred) times our distance from the moon. “When the sun is totally eclipsed,” reads one proposition, “the sun and the moon are then comprehended by one and the same cone, which has its vertex at our eye.”29

  * If it was not taken from his Babylonian predecessor Kidinnu.22

  † The equinoxes (lit., equal nights) are those two days of the year when the sun in its annual apparent motion crosses the equator northward (our vernal, Argentina’s autumnal, equinox), or southward (our autumnal equinox), making day and night equal for a day. The equinoctial points are those points in the sky where the equator of the celestial sphere intersects the ecliptic.

  * A confluence of blood sinuses in the dura mater, or outer membrane of the brain.

  * All dates for Zeno are disputed; the sources are contradictory. Zeller concludes to 350 for his birth and 260 for his death.50