The Greek Way

by Edith Hamilton

  I thought so little they rewarded me

  By making me the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!

  The woman joke, of course, is well to the fore with both men. It is ever with us. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Any number of passages might be selected.

  The song of the duchess in the Gondoliers is completely in the customary style:

  On the day when I was wedded

  To your admirable sire,

  I acknowledge that I dreaded

  An explosion of his ire.

  I was always very wary,

  For his fury was ecstatic—

  His refined vocabulary

  Most unpleasantly emphatic.

  Giving him the very best, and getting back the very worst—

  That is how I tried to tame your great progenitor—at first!

  But I found that a reliance on my threatening appearance,

  And a resolute defiance of marital interference,

  Was the only thing required for to make his temper supple,

  And you couldn’t have desired

  A more reciprocating couple.

  So with double-shotted guns and colours nailed unto the mast,

  I tamed your insignificant progenitor—at last!

  Aristophanes’ ladies are of quite the same kind. They form the chorus of the Thesmophoriazusæ, and they begin their address to the audience as follows:

  We now come forward and appeal to you to hear how the men all flout us,

  And the foolish abuse and the scandals let loose the silly things tell about us.

  They say all evil proceeds from us, war, battles, and murder even;

  We’re a tiresome, troublesome, quarrelsome lot, disturbers of earth and of heaven.

  Now, we ask you to put your minds on this: if we’re really the plague of your lives,

  Then tell us, please, why you’re all so keen to get us to be your wives?

  Pray, why do you like us to be at home, all ready to smile and greet you,

  And storm and sulk if your poor little wife isn’t always there to meet you?

  If we’re such a nuisance and pest, then why—we venture to put the question—

  Don’t you rather rejoice when we’re out of the way—a reasonable suggestion.

  If we stay the night at the house of a friend—I mean, the house of a lady,

  You hunt for us everywhere like mad and hint at something shady.

  Do you like to look at a plague and a pest? It seems you do, for you stare

  And ogle and give us killing looks if you see us anywhere.

  And if we think proper to blush and withdraw, as a lady, no doubt, should be doing,

  You will try to follow us all the more, and never give over pursuing.

  But we can show you up as well.

  The ways of a man we all can tell.

  Your heart’s in your stomach, every one,

  And you’ll do any one if you’re not first done.

  We know what the jokes are you love to make,

  And how you each fancy yourself a rake.

  Parallels such as these could be given indefinitely. The world moves slowly. Aristophanes in Athens, fifth century, B.C., Gilbert in nineteenth-century England, saw the same things and saw the same humor in them. Some things, however, were seen by the Athenian which the Englishman was constrained not to see and this fact constitutes the chief point of difference between them. What a gulf divides the Old Comedy, so riotous and so Rabelaisian, and the decorous operettas that would never raise a blush on the cheek of Anthony Trollope’s most ladylike heroine. A gulf indeed, but it is the gulf between the two periods. England’s awful arbiter of morals, the formidable Queen in her prime, was the audience that counted in Gilbert’s day, and it may be stated with certainty that Aristophanes himself would have abjured indecency and obscenity in that presence. Equally certainly, if he had lived in the age, par excellence, of gentility, he would have tempered his vigor, checked his swiftness, moderated his exuberance. Gilbert is an Aristophanes plentifully watered down, a steady and stolid-y, jolly Bank-holiday, every-day Aristophanes, a mid-Victorian Aristophanes.

  The question is irresistibly suggested, if Gilbert had lived in those free-thinking, free-acting, free-speaking days of Athens, “so different from the home life of our own dear Queen,” would he too have needed a Lord High Chamberlain

  To purge his native stage beyond a question

  Of “risky” situation and indelicate suggestion.

  There are indications that point to the possibility, had he not been held down by the laws the Victorian patrons of the drama gave. He could not but submit to these limitations, and only rarely, by a slip as it were, is a hint given of what he might have done if there had not always been before him the fear of that terrible pronunciamento: We are NOT amused!

  But Aristophanes’ audiences set no limits at all. Were Plato’s characters found among them, the meditative Phædrus, the gentle-mannered Agathon, Socrates, the philosophic, himself? Beyond all question. They sat in the theatre for hours on end, applauding a kind of Billingsgate Falstaff at his worst never approached; listening to violent invectives against the men—and the women—of Athens as a drunken, greedy, venal, vicious lot; laughing at jokes that would have put Rabelais to the blush.

  Such a theatre to our notions is not a place gentlemen of the Platonic stamp would frequent. A polite Molière comedy would be the kind of thing best suited to them, or if they must have improprieties to divert them, they should be suggested, not shouted. But our Athenians were not French seventeenth-century nobles, nor yet of Schnitzler’s twentieth-century Vienna; they were vigorous, hardy, hearty men; lovers of good talk but talk with a body to it, and lovers quite as much of physical prowess; hard-headed men, too, who could drink all night and discuss matters for clear heads only; realists as well, who were not given to drawing a veil before any of life’s facts. The body was of tremendous importance, acknowledged to be so, quite as much as the mind and the spirit.

  Such were Plato’s gentlemen and such were Aristophanes’ audiences. The comic theatre was a means of working off the exuberant energy of abounding vitality. There were no limitations to the subjects it could treat or the way of treating them. The result is that the distinctive quality of the Old Comedy cannot be illustrated by quotation. The most characteristic passages are unprintable. Something completely indecent is caricatured, wildly exaggerated, repeated in a dozen different ways, all fantastically absurd and all incredibly vulgar. The truth is that the jokes are often very funny. To read Aristophanes through at a sitting is to have Victorian guide posts laid low. He is so frank, so fearless, so completely without shame, one ends by feeling that indecency is just a part of life and a part with specially humorous possibilities. There is nothing of Peeping Tom anywhere, no sly whispering from behind a hand. The plainest and clearest words speak everything out unabashed. Life looks a coarse and vulgar thing, lived at the level of nature’s primitive needs, but it never looks a foul and rotten thing. Degeneracy plays no part. It is the way of a virile world, of robust men who can roar with laughter at any kind of slapstick, decent or indecent, but chiefly the last.

  Look upon this picture and on this. It is impossible for us today to make a coherent whole out of Aristophanes’ Athens and Plato’s. But if ever a day comes when our intelligentsia is made up of our star football players we shall be on the way to understanding the Athenians—as Aristophanes saw them.

  VIII

  Herodotus

  The First Sight-seer

  THE SLAVE IN GREECE

  Herodotus is the historian of the glorious fight for liberty in which the Greeks conquered the overwhelming power of Persia. They won the victory because they were free men defending their freedom against a tyrant and his army of slaves. So Herodotus saw the contest. The watchword was freedom; the stake was the independence or the enslavement of Greece; the issue made it sure that Greeks never would be slaves.

  The modern reader cannot accept
the proud words without a wondering question. What of the slaves these free Greeks owned? The Persian defeat did not set them free. What real idea of freedom could the conquerors at Marathon and Salamis have had, slave-owners, all of them? The question shows up, as no other question could, the difference between the mind of to-day and the mind of antiquity. To all the ancient world the freeing of slaves would have been sheer nonsense. There always had been slaves. In every community the way of life depended on them; they were a first necessity, accepted as such without a thought—literally; nobody ever paid any attention to them. Life in Greece as everywhere else was founded on slaves, but in all Greek literature up to the age of Pericles they never come into sight except as individuals here and there; the old nurse in the Odyssey, or the good swineherd, whose condition is accepted as naturally as any fact in nature. That is true from Homer to Æschylus, who makes Clytemnestra say to Cassandra, the Trojan princess, now her slave:

  If one is a slave

  It is well to serve in an old family

  Long used to riches. Every man who reaps

  A sudden harvest, wealth past all his hopes,

  Is savage to his slaves beyond the common.

  From us expect such use as custom grants.

  From the time immemorial that was the attitude in all the world. There was never anywhere a dreamer so rash or so romantic as to imagine a life without slaves. The loftiest thinkers, idealists, and moralists never had an idea that slavery was evil. In the Old Testament it is accepted without comment exactly as in the records of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Even the prophets of Israel did not utter a word against it, nor, for that matter, did St. Paul. What is strange is not that the Greeks took slavery for granted through hundreds of years, but that finally they began to think about it and question it.

  To Euripides the glory belongs of being the first to condemn it. “Slavery,” he wrote:

  That thing of evil, by its nature evil,

  Forcing submission from a man to what

  No man should yield to.

  He was, as usual, far in advance of his age. Even Plato, a generation later, could not keep pace with him. He never spoke against slavery; in his old age he actually advocated it. Still, there are signs that he was troubled by it. He says, “A slave is an embarrassing possession.” He had reached a point when he could not feel at ease with slaves, and he does not admit them to his ideal Republic.

  Except for this mild and indirect opposition and for Euripides’ open attack, we have no idea how or why the opposition to slavery spread, but by Aristotle’s time, a generation after Plato, it had come out into the open. Aristotle himself, for all his extraordinary powers of mind, looked at the matter purely from the point of view of common sense and social convenience. Slaves were necessary to carry on society as constituted, and he did not want any other kind of society. With no expressed or implied disapproval he defines a slave as “a machine which breathes, a piece of animated property,” an instance of the cold, clear statement of fact which so often opens people’s eyes and shocks them into opposition. Opponents to slavery increased. “There are people,” Aristotle writes—he does not include himself—“who consider owning slaves as violating natural law because the distinction between a slave and a free person is wholly conventional and has no place in nature, so that it rests on mere force and is devoid of justice.”

  That is the point Greek thought had reached more than two thousand four hundred years ago. Less than a hundred years ago America had to fight a great war before slavery was abolished. The matter for wondering is not that Herodotus saw nothing odd in slave-owners being the champions of freedom, but that in Greece alone, through all ancient and almost all modern times, were there men great enough and courageous enough to see through the conventional coverings that disguised slavery, and to proclaim it for what it was. A few years after Aristotle the Stoics denounced it as the most intolerable of all the wrongs man ever committed against man.

  Socrates, when the young Theætetus was introduced to him as a lad of brilliant promise, said to him that he felt sure he had thought a great deal. The boy answered, Oh, no—not that, but at least he had wondered a great deal. “Ah, that shows the lover of wisdom,” Socrates said, “for wisdom begins in wonder.”

  There have been few men ever who wondered more than Herodotus did. The word is perpetually on his pen: “A wonder was told me” “In that land there are ten thousand wonders” “Wonderful deeds, those” “It is a thing to be wondered at.” In this disposition he was the true child of his age—the great age of Greece. During his life his countrymen were using their freedom, newly secured to them by the Persian defeat, to wonder in all directions. They were no longer obliged to spend their best powers on war. Fighting occurred, but only sporadically. The Athenians on the whole were peaceful and prosperous; they had leisure to sit at home and think about the universe and dispute with Socrates, or to travel abroad and explore the world. In any case, to be active. Leisure meant activity in those days. Nobody wanted anything else. Energy and high spirits and vitality marked the fifth century in Athens.

  Herodotus, spiritually an Athenian although a native of Halicarnassus, summed up in himself the vigor of his times. He set out to travel over the earth as far as a man could go. What strength of will and also of body that called for under the travelling conditions of the day, it is impossible for us to realize. The first part of St. Paul’s journey to Rome gives a picture of the hazards that had to be faced at sea four hundred years after Herodotus, and a companion picture for the land is Xenophon’s description of the endless miles on foot or horseback through the burning wastes of Asia Minor to Babylon. It required a hungering and thirsting for knowledge and all the explorer’s zest to send a man on the travels Herodotus undertook; undertook, too, with keen enjoyment. He was the first sight-seer in the world, and there has never been a happier one. If he could see something new, discomforts and difficulties and dangers were nothing to him. He seems never to have noticed them. He never wrote about them. He filled his book with the marvels to rejoice a man’s heart—marvels of which the great earth was full. Oh, wonder that there were such goodly creatures in it!

  Just how far he travelled is hard to say. What he heard he gives with as great interest as what he saw, and he is so objective, so absorbed in whatever he is describing, he generally leaves himself out. But he certainly went as far east as Persia and as far west as Italy. He knew the coast of the Black Sea and had been in Arabia. In Egypt he went up the Nile to Assouan. It seems probable that he went to Cyrene; his descriptions often read like those of an eye witness. That is less true of Libya and Sicily, but it is quite possible that he had been in both countries. In fact, his journeys practically reached to the boundaries of the known world, and the information he gathered reached far beyond. He knew a good deal about India. For instance, there were wild trees there that bore wool, superior in whiteness and quality to sheep’s wool. The Indians made beautiful fine clothing from it. With India his information about the East stopped. He had heard a report of great deserts on the further side, but that was all. Of the West he writes:

  I am unable to speak with certainty. I can learn nothing about the islands from which our tin comes, and though I have asked everywhere I have met no one who has seen a sea on the west side of Europe. The truth is no one has discovered if Europe is surrounded by water or not.

  I smile at those who with no sure knowledge to guide them describe the ocean flowing around a perfectly circular earth.

  This is an example of the way the Greek mind worked. The great river Ocean encircling the earth had been described by Homer, the revered, even sacred, authority, and by Hesiod, second only to Homer, and yet Herodotus with never a qualm at possible impiety permits himself a smile. Quite as characteristic is his matter-of-fact statement that the priestess at Delphi had been more than once bribed to give an oracle favorable to one side in a dispute. This was attacking the Greek holy of holies—like accusing the pope of taking bribes. Herodotus had a
great respect for the Delphic oracle, but to his mind that was no reason to suppress a charge which he had investigated and believed to be true—and most assuredly no reason to abstain from investigation. When an authority, no matter how traditionally sacrosanct, came into conflict with a fact, the Greeks preferred the fact. They had no inclination to protect “sound doctrine taught of old.” A new force had come into the world with Greece, the idea of Truth to which personal bias and prejudice must yield.

  Herodotus is a shining instance of the strong Greek bent to examine and prove or disprove. He had a passion for finding out. The task he set himself was nothing less than to find out all about everything in the world. He is always called the “father of history,” but he was quite as much the father of geography, of archæology, of anthropology, of sociology, of whatever has to do with human beings and the places in which they live. He was as free from prejudice as it is possible to be. The Greek contempt for foreigners—in Greek, “barbarians”—never touched him. He was passionately on Athens’ side in her struggle against Persia, yet he admired and praised the Persians. He found them brave and chivalrous and truthful. Much that he saw in Phœnicia and Egypt seemed admirable to him, and even in uncivilized Scythia and Libya he saw something to commend. He did not go abroad to find Greek superiority. An occasional inferiority quite pleased him. He quotes with amusement Cyrus’ description of a Greek market as “a place set apart for people to go and cheat each other on oath.”