The Greek Way

by Edith Hamilton

  The difference between these two ideas of Athens is extraordinary. It cannot be explained by the difference between a poet and a historian. Euripides knew the world as well as Thucydides did. Few have ever known it better. It was Athens that was different. The two men were spokesmen each of his own time. In less than a generation the city that had been the champion of freedom had earned the name of the Tyrant City.

  Back in 480, after the final defeat of the Persians, the Athenians had been chosen to lead the new confederacy of free Greek states. It was a lofty post and they were proud to hold it, but the role demanded a high degree of disinterestedness. Athens could be the leader of the free only if she considered the welfare of others on the same level with her own. During the war with Persia she had been able to do that. She had shown herself at a great crisis not meanly preoccupied with her own advantage, but honorable, generous, just as Euripides saw her. As head of the league, too, for a time she had not let her power corrupt her. But only for a short time. The temptation to acquire still more power proved as always irresistible. Very soon the free confederacy was being turned into the Athenian Empire. There are changes, even violent ones, in a state which do not affect the character of the people. But this change went deep down to the very roots of religion and morality.

  To the men who fought against Persia, their astonishing victory was a proof of the belief that divine justice ruled the world. It worked, indeed, in a mysterious way; nevertheless, those who trampled on the rights of others would be punished no matter how strong they were, a nation as surely as an individual. The arrogance that springs from a consciousness of power was the sin Greeks had always hated most. In their earliest literature, throughout the stories of their mythology, it was sure to draw down the wrath of the gods upon the individual, and what it did to a nation they had seen for themselves when the proud power of Persia was crushed at Salamis. Their greatest leader Solon had declared that earthly justice mirrored the justice of heaven. Their greatest poet Æschylus wrote:

  Gold is never a bulwark,

  No defense to those who spurn

  God’s great altar of justice.

  But these convictions were swept away by the rising tide of money and power as Athens turned on her associates in the league and forced them to become her subjects. To the young men of the empire the old belief was proved false by the facts. Gold, as far as they could see, was actually an impregnable defense. Certainly they could see their city prospering by doing wrong to other cities. Where, then, was the divine power of justice? What was there to frighten a man if he injured those who could not injure him? Why should Thucydides and his contemporaries go on believing that the wicked would certainly be painfully punished and the good substantially rewarded? The younger generation of the Periclean age had only to use their eyes to be emancipated from the union between refraining from evil and being safe. A man who took every means to gain his own advantage at the expense of others most obviously did not have to live in terror of being struck dead by lightning. Suddenly, in imperial, invincible Athens the profit motive for doing right was taken away, along with the restraining fear of an odious penalty accurately meted out for each misdeed. The debit and credit system ceased to work, and the brilliant young men of the day, full of ambition and pride of possession, had nothing to take its place. To be sure, they continued to flock to the plays of Æschylus and Sophocles, but with all their intellect they did not understand them. They watched the Oresteia without a notion that the dramatist was showing them the supreme power of goodness, and they applauded the Antigone, never dreaming that they were looking at the lofty beauty of disinterested action.

  This drastic change was understood by one person in that brilliant and corrupted city. Thucydides saw that the foundation stone of all morality, the regard for the rights of others, had crumbled and fallen away. It had been the acknowledged foundation when Euripides wrote the Suppliants, not only of dealings between man and man, but also between state and state. The state embodied the idea of honorable men. But when Thucydides wrote, Athens had won an empire by dismissing that idea. In the big business of power politics it was not only necessary, it was right, for the state to seize every opportunity for self-advantage. Thucydides was the first probably to see, certainly to put into words, this new doctrine which was to become the avowed doctrine of the world. He makes Pericles explicitly deny that fair dealing and compassion are proper to the state as they are to the individual. A country pursuing her own way with no thought of imposing that way on others might, he points out, keep to such ideas, but not one bent upon dominion. “A city that rules an empire,” he writes, “holds nothing which is to its own interest as contrary to right and reason.”

  That was the spirit in Athens when the Peloponnesian War broke out. The growing power of the Athenian Empire aroused her most powerful competitor. Sparta took the field against her.

  All readers approach Thucydides with a preconception in favor of Athens. The Spartans have left the world nothing in the way of art or literature or science. Nevertheless it must be said that the Spartan ideal has remained persistent from their day to our own, the manifestation of an instinct hardly weakened through the last two thousand years. It is not an adult point of view. Sparta looked at things the way schoolboys do, very much like Kipling’s Stalky & Co. The ideal Spartan was plucky, indifferent to hardship and pain, a first-rate athlete. The less he talked or, for that matter, thought, the better. It was for him emphatically not to reason why, but always to do and die. He was a soldier and nothing else. The purpose of the Spartan state was war. The Athenians were realistic in their attitude toward war as toward everything else. They saw nothing attractive in dying on the battlefield. Pericles, in the oration Thucydides reports him as delivering over those who had fallen in battle, does not urge his hearers to go and do likewise, but bids them pray that if they fight it will be in less dangerous circumstances. War was a bad business in Athens. Nevertheless it was a necessity; the only way a state could take what belonged to others and, having taken, keep it. War could, of course, be very profitable.

  The Spartans had the sentimental, not the business, view of war. It was by no means a necessary evil; it was the noblest form of human activity. They felt a great admiration for battlefields. Tyrtæus, the poet they adored, expressed to perfection their romantic emotions. In a poem which reaches a height of sentimentality rarely attained even by bards of martial lays, he says:

  The youth’s fair form is fairest when he dies.

  Even in his death the boy is beautiful,

  The hero boy who dies in his life’s bloom.

  He lives in men’s regret and women’s tears.

  More sacred than in life, more beautiful by far,

  Because he perished on the battlefield.

  The idea that underlay the young Spartans’ training was their obligation to maintain the power of the state and ignore everything that did not directly contribute to it. All the other possibilities of life—imagination, love of beauty, intellectual interests—were put aside. The goal of human aspiration and achievement was to uphold the fatherland. Only what helped the state was good; only what harmed it was bad. A Spartan was not an individual but a part of a well-functioning machine which assumed all responsibility for him, exacted absolute submission from him, molded his character and his mind, and imbued him with the deep conviction that the chief end of man was to kill and be killed. Plutarch writes:

  In Sparta, the citizens’ way of life was fixed. In general, they had neither the will nor the ability to lead a private life. They were like a community of bees, clinging together around the leader and in an ecstasy of enthusiasm and selfless ambition belonging wholly to their country.

  Athens was a democracy. The General Assembly to which every Athenian belonged was the final authority. The executive body was a Council of Five Hundred for which all citizens were eligible. Officials were chosen by lot or elected by the people.

  The state did not take responsibility for the individ
ual Athenian; the individual had to take responsibility for the state. The result was, of course, a totally different idea of what the state was from that in Sparta. In Athens there was never a notion that it was a kind of mystic entity, different from and superior to the people who made it up. Athenian realism blocked any idea like that. The idea of the Athenian state was a union of individuals free to develop their own powers and live in their own way, obedient only to the laws they passed themselves and could criticize and change at will. And yet underneath this apparently ephemeral view of law was the conviction peculiarly Athenian which dominated the thought and the art of the fifth century—that the unlimited, the unrestrained, the lawless, were barbarous, ugly, irrational. Freedom strictly limited by self-control—that was the idea of Athens at her greatest. Her artists embodied it; her democracy did not. Athenian art and Athenian thought survived the test of time. Athenian democracy became imperial and failed.

  Imperial autocracy when it came to fighting proved the stronger. Year by year as the war went on the weakness of Athenian popular government became more and more evident in comparison with the stern discipline and undistracted policy of Sparta. Athens was moved this way or that as the man of the moment chose. One such person, the unprincipled but brilliant Alcibiades, from whom Socrates had expected great things, persuaded the people to send an expedition to conquer Sicily. He was a remarkable man, and in his hands the venture might have turned out well. Certainly the obvious reason why it failed is that it was carried out as badly as possible. Alcibiades was recalled almost as soon as the Athenian fleet reached Sicily. By that time popular feeling was hot against him because of a charge of sacrilege brought by his enemies. He had better sense than to face a populace seething with fervor to defend religion by making an example of the irreligious, and he transferred his allegiance to Sparta, where he proved very useful.

  Sheer mismanagement wrecked the Sicilian expedition. The Athenian people were led by men too small for the part to which they aspired. They were misled. They underestimated the strength of the enemy until it was too late. They trusted implicitly to their sea power and it failed them. In the final sea fight around Syracuse the Athenians were outmaneuvered and the great fleet was defeated. The disaster was complete. The ships were abandoned and the army started to retreat by land with no food, no provisions of any sort. After days of marching, the desperate, starving men were divided; the van lost touch with the rear, and it was easy for the Syracusans to overwhelm first one and then the other. The last scene was on the bank of a river where the Athenians, mad with thirst, rushed down to the water not seeing or not caring that the enemy was upon them. The river was soon flowing red with blood, but they fought each other to get to it and they drank of it as they died.

  All who were taken alive were made slaves. The greater part of them were put in the stone quarries near Syracuse where nature did the torturing without need of human assistance. The frightful heat by day and the bitter cold by night insured the survival of very few. Thucydides writes their epitaph: “Having done what men could they suffered what men must.”

  There has never been, there could not be, a more complete defeat. To inflict on the enemy what the Athenians suffered in Sicily is still the brightest hope that can animate a nation going to war. But it was not the worst disaster the war brought Athens. The climax of Thucydides’ history is his picture of what happened within the city to the individual Athenians during the years of fighting. It is a picture of the disintegration of a great people. He shows how swift the process was by two stories he tells, one early in the war, the other late. The first is about the revolt of an important island tributary. Athens sent a fleet to subdue her and then in furious anger voted to kill the men and enslave the women and children. In the debate before the vote was taken the popular leader of the moment warned the Athenians not to be misled by the three deadly foes of empire: pity, enjoyment of discussion, and the spirit of fair dealing. He carried the meeting, and a ship was dispatched with the fatal order. Then, still true to the spirit of Euripides’ Athens, the Athenians came to themselves. A second ship was sent to overtake the first, or at any rate to get to the island in time to prevent the massacre. The eagerness was such that the rowers were fed at their oars, taking no rest until they landed in time.

  The second story concerns another offending island, seven years later. This was little Melos, of no importance in herself, who wanted only to be neutral. But those seven years had left their mark on Athens. This time she did not have to be warned against pity and fair dealing. The conversation Thucydides gives between the envoys of the Athenians and the men of Melos shows what war did to the people who once had stood, as Herodotus said, in the perpetual choice between the lower and the higher, always for the higher.

  To a plea from the Melians that they have done no wrong and that to make war on them will be contrary to all justice, the envoys reply: “Justice is attained only when both sides are equal. The powerful exact what they can and the weak yield what they must.”

  “You ignore justice,” the Melians answer, “and yet it is to your interest, too, to regard it, because if you ever are defeated you will not be able to appeal to it.”

  “You must allow us to take the risk of that,” the Athenians say. “Our point is that we want to subjugate you without trouble to ourselves and that this will be better for you too.”

  “To become slaves?” ask the Melians.

  “Well—it will save you from a worse fate.”

  “You will not consent to our remaining at peace, your friends, but not your allies?”

  “No,” the Athenians answer. “We do not want your friendship. It would appear a proof of our weakness whereas your hatred is a proof of our power. Please remember that with you the question is one of self-preservation. We are the stronger.”

  “Fortune does not always side with the strong,” the Melians say. “There is hope that if we do our utmost we can stand erect.”

  “Beware of hope,” the Athenians reply. “Do not be like the common crowd who when visible grounds for hope fail betake themselves to the invisible, religion and the like. We advise you to turn away from such folly. And may we remind you that in all this discussion you have not advanced one argument that practical men would use.”

  The Melians were unpractical and they fought. They were conquered with little trouble to Athens. She put the men to death and made slaves of the women and children. She had reached a point where she did not care to use fine words about ugly facts, and the reason was that they had ceased to look ugly to her. Vices by then, Thucydides says, were esteemed as virtues. The very meaning of words changed; deceit was praised as shrewdness, recklessness held to be courage, loyalty, moderation, generosity, scorned as proofs of weakness. “That good will which is the chief element in a noble nature was laughed out of court and vanished. Every man distrusted every other man.” That was where the race for power brought the Athenians in the end.

  Sparta was better off. Her ideal of the duty of death on a battlefield was guaranteed not to satisfy men for long, but it was better by far than the lack of any ideal shown in the Athenians’ talk to the Melians. Athens was conquered in 404. Violent party strife divided the city, and the aristocratic coterie, always pro-Sparta, finally got the upper hand. There was another revolution of the power cycle.

  The succeeding one came more quickly. Sparta could not rule other nations. Athens had taxed them heavily, but except for that she had not interfered with them. Sparta’s methods are explained by the remark of an Athenian who admired her, to the effect that the will of any Spartan citizen was absolute law in the subject states. She was never able to understand any way but her own, and the other Greeks did not take kindly to that. They were not docile and they did not like obedience. She could not hold them long. The Spartan Empire lasted only a few years. Toward the end of the war she had made an alliance with her old arch-enemy, Persia, which helped her greatly in reducing Athens. But soon afterwards the two allies quarreled. Spart
a was defeated and Persia took away the sea empire she had taken away from Athens.

  That was the result of twenty-seven years of war. It seems at first sight a triumph of futility, but it was worse than that. Very many Athenians were killed during those years. Fortunately for us, some who were of an age to fight—Socrates, Plato, Thucydides himself, and others equally familiar—did not die on battlefields; but it cannot be doubted that among all who did, there were those who would have led the world up to new heights. The flame that burned so brightly in fifth-century Athens would have given more and still more light to the world if these dead had not died, and died truly in vain.

  The cause of all these evils was the desire for power which greed and ambition inspire.

  —Thucydides III, 83

  X

  Xenophon

  The Ordinary Athenian Gentleman

  To turn from Thucydides to Xenophon is a pleasant, but surprising, experience. The lives of the two men overlapped, although Xenophon was much the younger. Both were Athenians and soldiers; both lived through the war and saw the defeat of Athens. Yet they inhabited different worlds; worlds so different, they seem to have no connection with each other. Thucydides’ world was a place racked and ruined and disintegrated by war, where hope was gone and happiness was unimaginable. Xenophon’s was a cheerful place with many nice people in it and many agreeable ways of passing the time. There was hunting, for instance. He writes a charming essay about it: of the delights of the early start, in winter over the snow, to track the hare with hounds as keen for the chase as their masters; in spring “when the fields are so full of wildflowers, the scent for the dogs is poor” or a deer may be the quarry, first-rate sport; or a wild boar, dangerous, but delightfully exciting. Such rewards, too, as the hunter has: he keeps strong and young far longer than other men; he is braver, and even more trustworthy—although why that should be our author does not trouble to explain. A hunting man just is better than one who does not hunt and that is all there is to it. Ask any fox-hunting squire in English literature. Hunting is a good, healthy, honest pleasure, and a young man is lucky if he takes to it. It will save him from city vices and incline him to love virtue.