BOOK II. EDUCATION. — CHAPTER I. THEORY OF EDUCATION.—BIRTH OF CHILDREN.—INFANTICIDE. — CHAPTER II. BIRTH-FEAST—NAMING THE CHILD.—NURSERY—NURSERY TALES—SPARTAN FESTIVAL. — CHAPTER III. TOYS, SPORTS, AND PASTIMES. — CHAPTER IV. ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION. — CHAPTER V. EXERCISES OF YOUTH. — CHAPTER VI. HUNTING AND FOWLING. — CHAPTER VII. SCHOOLS OF THE PHILOSOPHERS AND SOPHISTS. — CHAPTER VIII. EDUCATION OF THE SPARTANS, CRETANS, ARCADIANS, ETC. — CHAPTER X. HELLENIC LITERATURE. — CHAPTER XI. SPIRIT OF THE GRECIAN RELIGION.
107
Whether on education the Greeks thought more
wisely than we do or not,[318] they certainly contemplated
the subject from a more elevated point of view. They
regarded it as the matrix in which future generations
are fashioned, and receive that peculiar temperament
and character belonging to the institutions that presided
at their birth. Their theories were so large as to
comprehend the whole developement of individual existence,
from the moment when the human germ is
quickened into life until the grave closes the scene,
and in many cases looked still further; for the rites
of initiation and a great part of their ethics had reference
to another world. On this account we find
their legislators possessed by extreme solicitude respecting
the character of those teachers into whose
108hands the souls of the people were to be placed, to
receive the first principles of good or evil, to be
invigorated, raised, and purified by the former, or by
the latter to be perverted, or precipitated down the
slopes of vice and effeminacy, by which nations sink
from freedom to servitude. Among them, moreover,
it was never matter of doubt, whether the light of
knowledge should be allowed to stream upon the
summits of society only, or be suffered to descend
into its lower depths and visit the cottages of the
poor. Whatever education had to impart was, in
most states, imparted to all the citizens, as far as their
leisure or their capacity would permit them to receive
it. The whole object, indeed, of education among the
Greeks was to create good citizens, from which it has
by some been inferred that they confined their views
to the delivering of secular instruction. But this is
to take a narrow and ignorant view of the subject,
since religion was not only an element of education
but regarded as of more importance than all its other
elements taken together. For it had not escaped the
Hellenic legislators, that in many circumstances of life
man is placed beyond the reach and scrutiny of laws
and public opinion, where he must be free to act according
to the dictates of conscience, which, if not
rightly trained, purified, and rendered clearsighted by
religion, will often dictate amiss. It is of the utmost
moment, therefore, that in these retired situations man
should not consider himself placed beyond the range
of every eye, and so be tempted to lay the foundation
of habits which, begun in secrecy, may soon acquire
boldness to endure the light and set the laws themselves
at defiance. Accordingly over those retired
moments in which man at first sight appears to commune
with himself alone, religion was called in to
teach that there were invisible inspectors, who registered,
not only the evil deeds and evil words they
witnessed, but even the evil thoughts and emotions
of the heart, the first impulses to crime in the lowest
abysses of the mind. Consistently with this view of
109the subject, we discover everywhere in Greek history
and literature traces of an almost puritanical scrupulousness
in whatever appeared to belong to religion,
so that in addressing the Athenians St. Paul himself
was induced to reproach them with the excesses of
their devotional spirit, which degenerated too frequently
into superstition. But the original design
with which this spirit was cultivated was wise and
good, its intention being to rescue men from the
sway of their inferior passions,—from envy, from avarice,
from selfishness, and to inspire them with faith in
their own natural dignity by representing their actions
as of sufficient importance to excite the notice, provoke
the anger, or conciliate the favour of the immortal
gods. This religion, which base and sordid minds
regard as humiliating to humanity, was by Grecian
lawgivers and founders of states contemplated as a
kind of holy leaven designed by God himself, to pervade,
quicken, and expand society to its utmost dimensions.
The question which commands so much attention
in modern states, viz. whether education should be
national and uniform, likewise much occupied the
thoughts of ancient statesmen, and it is known that
in most cases they decided in the affirmative. It may
however be laid down as an axiom, that among a
phlegmatic and passive-minded people, where the government
has not yet acquired its proper form and
developement, the establishment of a national system
of education, complete in all its parts and extending
to the whole body of the citizens, must be
infallibly pernicious. For such as the government is
at the commencement such very nearly will it continue,
as was proved by the example of Crete and
Sparta. For the Cretan legislators, arresting the progress
of society at a certain point by the establishment
of an iron system of education, before the popular
mind had acquired its full growth and expansion,
dwarfed the Cretan people completely, and by preventing
their keeping pace with their countrymen
110rendered them in historical times inferior to all their
neighbours. In Sparta, again, the form of polity
given to the state by Lycurgus, wonderful for the age
in which it was framed, obtained perpetuity solely
by the operation of his pædonomical institutions. The
imperfection, however, of the system arose from this
circumstance, that the Spartan government was framed
too early in the career of civilisation. Had its lawgiver
lived a century or two later, he would have established
his institutions on a broader and more elevated
basis, so that they would have remained longer nearly
on a level with the progressive institutions of neighbouring
states. But he fixed the form of the Spartan
commonwealth when the general mind of Greece had
scarcely emerged from barbarism; and as the rigid and
unyielding nature of his laws forbade any great improvement,
Sparta continued to bear about her in the most
refined ages of Greece innumerable marks of the rude
period in which she had risen. From this circumstance
flowed many of her crimes and misfortunes.
Forbidden to keep pace with her neighbours in knowledge
and refinement, which by rendering them inventive,
enterprising, and experienced, elevated them to
power, she was compelled, in order to maintain her
ground, to have recourse to astuteness, stratagem, and
often to perfidy.
The Spartan system, it is well known, made at first,
and for some ages, little or no use of books. But this,
at certain stages of society, was scarcely an evil;[319] for
knowledge can be imparted, virtues implanted and
cherished, and great minds ripened to maturity without
their aid. The teacher, in this case, rendered wise
by meditation and experience, takes the place of a
book, and by oral communication, by precept, and by
example, instructs, and disciplines, and moulds his
pupil into what he would have him be. By this process
111both are benefited. The preceptor’s mind, kept
in constant activity, acquires daily new force and expansion;
and the pupil’s in like manner. In a state,
therefore, like that of Sparta, in the age of Lycurgus,
it was possible to acquire all necessary knowledge
without books, of which indeed very few existed.
But afterwards, when the Ionian republics began to be
refined and elevated by philosophy and literature,
Sparta, unable to accompany them, fell into the background:
still preserving, however, her warlike habits
she was enabled on many occasions to overawe and
subdue them.
Among the Athenians,[320] though knowledge was universally
diffused, there existed, properly speaking, no
system of national education. The people, like their
state, were in perpetual progress, aiming at perfection,
and sometimes approaching it; but precipitated by the
excess of their intellectual and physical energies into
numerous and constantly recurring errors. While
Sparta, as we have seen, remained content with the
wisdom indigenous to her soil, scanty and imperfect as
it was, Athens converted herself into one vast mart,
whither every man who had anything new to communicate
hastened eagerly, and found the sure reward of
his ingenuity. Philosophers, sophists, geometricians,
astronomers, artists, musicians, actors, from all parts
of Greece and her most distant colonies, flocked to
Athens to obtain from its quick-sighted, versatile, impartial,
and most generous people that approbation
which in the ancient world constituted fame. Therefore,
although the laws regulated the material circumstances
of the schools and gymnasia, prescribed the
hours at which they should be opened and closed, and
watched earnestly over the morals both of preceptors
and pupils, there was a constant indraught of fresh
science, a perpetually increasing experience and knowledge
of the world, and, consequent thereupon, a deep-rooted
conviction of their superiority over their neighbours,
112an impatience of antiquated forms, and an audacious
reliance on their own powers and resources which
betrayed them into the most hazardous schemes of
ambition.
But, by pushing too far their literary and philosophical
studies, the Athenians were induced at length
to neglect the cultivation of the arts of war, which
they appeared to regard as a low and servile drudgery.
And this capital error, in spite of all their acquirements
and achievements in eloquence and philosophy,—in
spite of their lofty speculation and “style of
gods,” brought their state to a premature dissolution;
while Sparta, with inferior institutions, and ignorance
which even the children at Athens would have laughed
at, was enabled much longer to preserve its existence,
from its impassioned application to the use of arms,
aided, perhaps, by a stronger and more secluded position.
From this it appears that of all sciences that of
war is the chiefest, since, where this is cultivated, a
nation may maintain its independence without the aid
of any other; whereas the most knowing, refined, and
cultivated men, if they neglect the use of arms, will
not be able to stand their ground against a handful
even of barbarians. They mistake, too, who look upon
literature and the sciences as a kind of palladium
against barbarism,[321] for a whole nation may read and
write, like the inhabitants of the Birman empire, without
being either civilised or wise; and may possess
the best books and the power to read them, without
being able to profit by the lessons of wisdom they
contain, as is proved by the example of the Greeks
and Romans, who perished rather from a surfeit of
knowledge than from any lack of instruction. But it
is time, perhaps, to quit these general speculations, and
proceed to develope, as far as existing monuments will
enable us, the several systems of education which prevailed
in the different parts of Greece.
113Among Hellenic legislators the care of children
commenced before their birth. Their mothers were
subject while pregnant to the operation of certain
rules; their food and exercises were regulated, and in
most cases the laws, or at least the manners, required
them to lead a sedentary, inactive, and above all a
tranquil life.[322] Physicians, guided by experience, prescribed
a somewhat abstemious diet; and wine was
prohibited, or only permitted to be taken with water,
which, where reason is consulted, we find to be the
practice at the present day. But Lycurgus, in the
article of exercise, gave birth to, or, at least, sanctioned,
customs wholly different.[323] Even while enceinte
his women were required to be abroad, engaged
in their usual athletic recreations, eating as before and
drinking as before.
On this occasion, too, as on all others, the deep-rooted
piety of the nation displayed itself. Prayers
and sacrifices were habitually offered up by all married
persons for children, as afterwards by Christian
ladies to the saints;[324] and these of course were not
discontinued, when it appeared by unequivocal signs
that their desires had begun to receive their fulfilment.
What the divinities were whom on these occasions
the Athenian matrons invoked under the name
of Tritopatores, it seems difficult to determine. Demon
in Suidas[325] supposes them to be the winds; but
Philochoros, the most learned of ancient writers on
the antiquities of Attica, imagined them to be the
first three sons of Helios and Gaia. According to
some they were called Cottos or Coros, Gyges or
Gyes, and Briareus; according to others Amalcides,
114Protocles, and Protocleon, the watchers and guardians
of the wind. There are authors, moreover, by whom
they have been confounded with the Dii Kabyri of
Samothrace.
During the period of their confinement women
were supposed to be under the protection of Eileithyia.
This goddess, who by Olen the Lycian was considered
older than Kronos,[326] had the honour as certain mythical
legends relate, of being the mother of love,[327]
though several ancient authors appear to have confounded
her with Pepromene or Fate, others with
Hera, and others again with Artemis or the moon.
The traditions of the mythology respecting this divinity
were various. Her worship seems to have made
its first appearance among the Greeks in the island
of Delos, whither she is said to have come from the
country of the Hyperboreans, to lend her aid to Leto,
when beneath the palm tree, which Zeus caused to
spring up over her,[328] she gave birth to the gods of
night and day. From that time forward she was
held in veneration by the Delians, who in her honour
offered up sacrifices, chaunting the hymns of Olen,
whence we may infer she was a Pelasgian deity.
From thence her name and worship were diffused
through the other islands and states of Hellas;
though the Cretans pretended that she was born at
Amnisos in the Knossian territory, and was a daughter
of Hera. The Athenians, who erected a temple
to Eileithyia appeared to favour both traditions, since
of the two statues which were found in her fane the
more ancient was said to have been brought from
Delos by Erisicthon, while the second, dedicated by
Phædra, came from Crete. Among the Athenians,
alone, as an indication of the national modesty, the
wooden images of this mysterious divinity were significantly
veiled to the toes.[329]
115The simple delicacy of remoter ages required
women to be attended, while becoming mothers, by
individuals of their own sex. But the contrary practice,
now general among civilised nations, prevailed
early at Athens, where the study of medicine, in
which the accoucheur’s[330] art is included, was prohibited
to women and slaves. The consequences bear
stronger testimony to the refined taste and truly
feminine feelings of the Athenian ladies than a thousand
panegyrics. Numbers, rather than submit to the
immodest injunctions of fashion, declined all aid, and
perished in their harems: observing which, and moved
strongly by the desire to preserve the lives of her
noble-minded countrywomen, a female citizen named
Agnodice, disguised as a man, acquired a competent
knowledge of the theory and practice of physic in the
medical school of Herophilos; she then confided her
secret to the women who universally determined to
avail themselves of her services, and in consequence
her practice became so extensive that the jealousy of
the other practitioners was violently excited. In revenge,
therefore, as she still maintained her disguise,
they preferred an accusation against her in the court
of Areiopagos as a general seducer. To clear herself
Agnodice made known her sex, upon which the envious
Æsculapians prosecuted her under the provisions
of the old law. In behalf of their benefactress the
principal gentlewomen appeared in court, and mingling
the highest testimony in favour of Agnodice
with many bitter reproaches, they not only obtained
her acquittal, but the repeal of the obnoxious law,
and permission for any free woman to become an
accoucheuse.[331]
Mention is made by ancient writers of several rude
and hardy tribes, whose women, like those of HindùstânHindùstân
at the present day, stood in very little need of
116the midwife’s aid. Thus Varro,[332] speaking of the
rough shepherdesses of Italy, observes that among
the countrywomen of Illyria, bringing forth children
was regarded as a slight matter; for that, stepping
aside from their work in the fields, they would return
presently with an infant in their arms, having first
bathed it in some fountain or running stream,
appearing rather to have found, than given birth to,
a child. Nor are the manners of these uncultivated
people at all altered in modern times, as appears from
an anecdote related to Pietro Vittore,[333] by Francesco
Sardonati, professor of Latin at Ragusa, who said that
he saw a woman go out empty-handed to a forest for
wood, and return shortly afterwards with a bundle
on her head and a new-born infant in her arms. At
Athens, however, where the women were peculiarly
tender and delicate, the young mother remained within
doors full six weeks,[334] when the festival of the fortieth
day was celebrated, after which she went forth,
as our ladies do to be churched, to offer up sacrifices
and return thanks in the temple of Artemis or some
other divinity.
New-born infants, when designed to be reared,
were at Athens and in the rest of Greece bathed in
cold water: at Sparta in wine, with the view of producing
convulsions and death should the child be
feeble, whereas, were its constitution strong and vigorous,
it would thus they imagined, “acquire a
greater degree of firmness, and get a temper in proportion,
as Potter[335] expresses it, like steel in the
quenching.” Swaddling-bands[336] also, in use throughout
the rest of Greece, were banished from Sparta,
which led the way therefore to that improved system
of infant management advocated by Rousseau, Lacépède
and others,[337] and now generally adopted in
117this country, though but partially in France. The
ceremonies and customs of the Greeks were a kind
of symbolical language, many times containing important
meaning, and always perhaps indicative of the
character and familiar feelings of the race. Much
stress was laid on the thing wherein the infant was
placed upon its entrance into the world. This, among
the Athenians, consisted of a wrapper adorned with
an embroidered figure of the Gorgon’s head, the device
represented on the shield of Athena, tutelar
divinity of the state. From the beginning every
citizen seemed thus to be placed under the immediate
shelter of that goddess’s ægis which should be
extended over him in peace and in war. In other
parts of Greece the child’s first bed, and too frequently
his last, was a shield.[338] In accordance with
this custom we find Alcmena cradling her twin boys
Heracles and Iphicles in Amphytrion’s buckler; and
the same practice prevailed, as might have been expected,
at Sparta, where war constituted to men
the sole object of life.[339] Elsewhere other symbols
spoke to the future sense rather than the present
of the new citizen. In agricultural countries the
military symbol was replaced by a winnowing van,
not unfrequently of gold or other costly materials;[340]
though it may be doubted whether the word so
rendered meant not rather a cradle in the form of
that rustic implement.
In another custom, long on these occasions observed,
we discern traces of that serpent-worship
which at different epochs diffused itself so widely
over the world. Among opulent and noble families
118at Athens new-born children were laid on golden
amulets in the form of dragons by which they were
supposed to commemorate Athena’s delivery of Erichthonios
to the care of two guardians of that description.[341]
But under certain circumstances, instead of the
joy and gladness by which the noble and the great
are greeted on their entrance into the world, the
birth of a child was, as in Thrace,[342] an event fraught
with sorrow and misery. It announced in fact the
approach of an enemy, of one who, if he survived,
must snatch from them a portion of what already
would scarcely sustain life. Together with the announcement
of his birth, therefore, came the awful
consciousness that war must be made on him—that
he must in short be cast forth, a scape-goat for the
sins of society, not for his own—that his parents
who should have cherished him, whose best solace
he should have been, must steel their hearts and
close fast their ears against the voice of nature, and
become his executioners. The poor-laws of Greece,
or rather their substitutes for poor-laws, were exceedingly
imperfect, and foundling hospitals had not
been introduced. They got rid of their surplus population,
as many nations still do, by murder; for
infanticide, under various forms, has more or less
prevailed in all civilised countries, if the term civilised
can properly be applied to nations among whom
crimes so demoralising are habitually perpetrated.
No doubt the sullen reluctance of a father to imbrue
his hands in the blood of his child produced
daily many a heart-rending scene; no doubt the sting
of want must have been keenly felt before the habit
of slaughter was confirmed;—but the fashion once
set, children were thrown into an earthen pot and
119exposed in mountainous and desert places to perish of
cold, or fall a prey to carnivorous birds[343] or wolves,
as coolly as they are murdered by their young and
frail mothers in our own Christian land.
Under all circumstances, however, the parents thus
criminal are objects of pity. Misery is blind, and crime
is blind. But what shall we say to those priests of humanity,
those sacred and reverend interpreters of nature,—the
philosophers who come forward to sanction
and justify the practice? It would be criminal to
disguise the fact, that both Plato and Aristotle, the
great representatives of the wisdom of the Pagan
world,[344] conceived infanticide, under certain circumstances,
to be allowable. Near, therefore, as the former
stood to the truths of Christianity, there was still
a cloud between him and them. What he saw, he saw
through a glass darkly. Christ had not then stamped
the seal of divinity upon human nature, had not shed
abroad that light by which alone we discover the true
features of crime, no less than the true features of holiness.
Philosophy is beautiful; but with the beauty
of one involuntarily polluted. Religion alone, breathing
of heaven, radiant with light, reflected on its whole
form from the face of God, is lovely altogether without
spot or blemish. The Greeks wanting this guide
went astray. They looked at the question of population
as coarse utilitarians,—all but the gross, unintellectual
Thebans, who, relying on the vast fertility of their
soil, or led by some better instinct, on this point soared
high above their cultivated neighbours, an example of
how the foolish things of this world, even in the unregenerate
state of nature, may sometimes confound the
wise. Among the Tyrrhenians,[345] likewise, a people of
Pelasgian origin, infanticide was unknown, probably
120because among them it was accounted no disgrace to
be the parents of illegitimate offspring; indeed the
sense of shame could not, in any case, be very keen
among a people whose female slaves served naked at
table, and where even the ladies appeared at public
entertainments in the same state, drinking bumpers
and joining freely in the conversation of the men.
In the modern world to take the life of an infant is
a capital offence, yet we see with how little fear or
ceremony the law is set at nought. It will, therefore,
readily be supposed that in those countries of antiquity
where neither law nor public opinion opposed
the practice, but in some cases winked at, in
others enjoined it, the number of child-murders must
have been enormous. Sparta very naturally took the
lead in this guilty course.[346] Here it was not permitted
to private individuals to make away with their offspring
stealthily, and with those marks of shame and
compunction inseparable from individual guilt. The
state monopolized the right to Herodise, and by sharing
the criminality among great numbers appeared to
silence the objections of conscience. Fathers were
compelled by law to bring their new-born infants to
certain officers, old, grave men,[347] who held their sittings
in the Lesche of their tribe, and after due deliberation
determined on the claim of each child to live
or die. By what rules they decided, rude and ignorant
of physiology as they were, it would now be impossible
positively to affirm. Little skill no doubt had
they in detecting the latent seeds of robustness and
physical energy, still less those of splendid mental endowments
lurking in the crimson countenance of helpless
infancy. They who might have proved the wise
and good of their generation no doubt often went
instead of the mere animal. However, giving
orders that the strong and apparently healthy should
121be nursed, the weakly and delicate, often the noblest
men, and the bravest soldiers, as witness Lucius Sulla,
were condemned to be cast like so many puppy dogs
into the Apothetæ, a deep cavern at the foot of Mount
Taygetos. This den of death relieved the Spartans
from the necessity of erecting workhouses or enacting
poor-laws. The surplus population went into that pit.
To a certain extent, and in a mitigated form, the
same practice prevailed at Athens. Here, however, it
was more a matter of custom than of law, and in this
respect differed materially[348] from the practice of Sparta,
that it was left entirely to the father to determine the
fate of his children. Accordingly, the more cold-blooded
had recourse to murder, while the less atrocious
exposed them in jars in desert places to
perish, or in the thronged and crowded quarters of
the city in the hope that they might excite in others
that compassion, which he, their father, denied them.[349]
And humane individuals were often found who, like
our Squire Allworthy, would sympathise with these
deserted creatures.[350] Numerous examples occur in the
comic poets. In these cases poverty was no doubt
the motive, particularly when boys were exposed;
but even wealthy persons, reasoning like the Rajpoots
of northern India, would prefer exposing their daughters,
to the care and expense of educating them to an
uncertain destiny. On these occasions the child was
dressed and swaddled more or less carefully, placed in
a large earthen vessel called a chytra,[351]—the same in
which soup was made, and which ought, therefore, to
have awakened humane associations,—and laid at
the mouth of some cave without the walls, or in
such situations as I have above described. To this
custom allusion is made in the anecdote of a foundling,
who amusing himself by rolling a chytra before
122him with his foot, “What! exclaimed some one
desirous of reminding him of his origin, have you
the impiety to kick your mother in the belly?”[352]
Sometimes when the object was rather to escape
shame than to shun the expense of education, rings,
jewels, or other valuable tokens were suspended
about the child, or put along with it into the chytra.[353]
And in the comic writers these usually assist in
bringing about a discovery. If they fell into the
hands of the poor the costly marks of noble birth,
always held in honour by the ignorant and needy,
would perhaps tempt them to preserve and cherish
the off-cast, as in the case of Shakespeare’s Perdita,
or in the event of death, would defray the
expenses of their funerals. Sometimes superstition
operated on their minds, urging them into a mock
show of sharing their possessions with the little
wretches they abandoned.[354] Thus Sostrata, wife of
Chremes, in the Self-tormentor delivered along with
her little daughter to the person who was to expose
it, a ring from her own finger to be left with the
child, that should it die it might not be wholly deprived
of all share of their property. Such also is
the behaviour of Creusa in Euripides; for Hermes,
whom the poet introduces unfolding the argument
of the drama, relates that when the young princess
laid her new-born son to perish in the cavern, where
he had been conceived, she took off her costly ornaments
and with them decked her devoted boy.[355]
From another part of the same play it may be inferred
that children were often exposed on the steps of
Apollo’s temple at Delphi, and nurtured by the
Pythoness.[356] Indeed the priestess, on discovering Ion,
who had been brought thither by Hermes from Attica,
concludes at once that some unfortunate Delphian
123girl[357] is his mother, and adopts him under that impression.
From the sequel it would appear that such children
were the slaves of the temple, and under the
immediate protection of the god.[358]
In the plain of Eleutheræ, near the temple of
Dionysos, is a cavern, and close beside it a fountain.
Here, according to the poets, Antiope brought forth
Zethos and Amphion, twin sons of Zeus, whom,
to conceal her shame, she abandoned where they
were born. The infants were immediately afterwards
discovered by a shepherd, who, having bathed
them in the neighbouring spring, took them to his
cot, where they were brought up as his own children.[359]
The catastrophe of many an ancient play
was brought about by a discovery of the real characters
of persons who had been exposed in infancy.
Thus Œdipus, whose story is too well known to need
repetition, was abandoned on Mount Cithæron. The
daughters of Phineus,[360] of whom nothing else has come
down to us, had been cast forth in infancy and preserved,
and were afterwards brought to be put to
death on the same spot; by alluding to which their
lives were saved. The sons,[361] likewise, of Tyro, Peleus
and Neleus, were deserted by their mother, who placed
them in a little bark or chest on the banks of the
Enipeus, a circumstance which served afterwards to
reveal the parentage of the twins. The story of Romulus
and Remus, who were thus abandoned by their
vestal mother, is familiar to every reader; and from
the example of Moses recorded in the sacred volume,
we may infer that the exposing of children was common
in remoter ages in Egypt. Pindar,[362] in relating
the birth of the prophet Iamos, presents us with a
poetical picture of one of these unhappy transactions.
124Evadne, daughter of Poseidon by the river-nymph
Pitana, dwelling at the court of Æpytos a king of
Arcadia, going forth, like the daughters of the Patriarchs,
to draw water from a fountain, is overtaken
by her birth-pangs.
“Her crimsoned girdle down was flung,
The silver ewer beside her laid,
Amid a tangled thicket, hung
With canopy of brownest shade;
When forth the glorious babe she brought,
His soul instinct with heavenly thought.
Sent by the golden-tressed god,
Near her the Fates indulgent stood,
With Eileithyia mild.
One short sweet pang released the child,
And Iamos sprang forth to light.
A wail she uttered; left him then,
Where on the ground he lay;
When straight two dragons came,
With eyes of azure flame,
By will divine awaked out of their den;
And with the bees’ unharmful venom they
Fed him, and nursled through the night and day.
The king meanwhile had come
From stony Pytho driving, and at home
Did of them all after the boy inquire
Born of Evadne; for, he said, the sire
Was Phœbos, and that he
Should of earth’s prophets wisest be,
And that his generation should not fail.
Not to have seen or heard him they avouched,
Now five days born. But he, on rushes couched,
Was covered up in that wide brambly maze;
His delicate body met
With yellow and empurpled rays
From many a violet:
And hence his mother bade him claim
For ever this undying name.”
Generally, it would appear, illegitimate children were
exposed in the neighbourhood of the Gymnasium, in
the Cynosarges, because, as suggested by Suidas, Heracles,
who was himself a bastard, had a temple there.
On the subject of infanticide the Thebans,[363] as I
125have said, entertained juster sentiments than the rest
of their countrymen. By their institutions it was
made a capital crime; but because severe laws would
not furnish the indigent with the means of supporting
the children they were forbidden to kill, they by another
enactment provided for their maintenance. If a
poor man found himself unable to support an addition
to his family, he was commanded to bear his children
immediately from the birth, wrapped in swaddling-clothes,
to the magistrates, who disposed of them for
a small sum to wealthy people in want of children or
servants: for, according to the Theban laws, they who
undertook the charge of foundlings, if they may be so
called, were entitled to their services in return for
their nursing and education.
Connected with infanticide is another subject
equally important, but of very difficult treatment;
that is practices to destroy the infant before the
birth.[364] In modern nations all such offences are
theoretically visited with very severe punishment by
the law, and public opinion so strongly condemns
them that no one solicitous of upholding a respectable
character in society will dare to be their apologist.
It was otherwise in antiquity. The greatest
dread of a superabundant population was in many
states felt, and led to customs and acts of a very
nefarious nature; for some classes of which, if not
for all, writers of highest eminence are found to
plead. Thus Pliny,[365] commonly a great declaimer
126in behalf of virtue, admits that some artificial limit
should be put to female productiveness; and Aristotle,
despite his far nobler and more generous ethics, had
on this point no loftier views. The regulations also
of the Cretan Minos—but let them remain in the
obscurity which encompasses his entire code.
Among the Romans several modern writers appear
to suppose the existence of more humane feelings, for
which it would certainly have been difficult to account.
An ancient law attributed to Romulus has
misled them. By this it was enacted that no male
child should be exposed; and that of daughters the
first should be permitted to live, while the others
having been brought up till they were three years
old, might then if judged expedient be destroyed.[366]
The legislator, it is argued, knew human nature too
well to fear that parents who had preserved their children
three years would after that take away their
lives. But infants exceedingly mutilated or deformed
might be killed at once, having first been shown to
five neighbours, and these neighbours, like the overseers
of murder at Lacedæmon, were probably lax in
interpreting the law, which, acknowledging the principle,
would easily tolerate variations in the practice.[367]
Be this, however, as it may, child-murder and child
dropping were in imperial times of ordinary occurrence
at Rome. There was in the Herb-market a
pillar called the “Milky column,”[368] whither foundlings
were brought to be suckled by public nurses, or to be
fed with milk—for the passage in Festus may be both
ways interpreted, and their numbers would seem to
have been considerable. The Christian writers constantly
127object the practice of infanticide to the Romans.
“You cast forth your sons,” says Tertullian,[369]
“to be picked up and nourished by the first woman
that passes.” And the poor, as Ambrose remarks,
would desert and expose their little ones, and if
caught deny them to be theirs.[370] Others adopted
more decisive measures, and instead of exposing
strangled them.[371] Probably, moreover, it was the
atrocious device of legislators to get rid of their
superabundant population that gave rise to the rite
of child-sacrificing known to have prevailed among
the Phœnicians, who passed their children through
fire to Moloch; and among their descendants the
Carthaginians,[372] who offered up infants to their gods,
as at the present day our own idolatrous subjects in
the East cast forth their first-born infants on islands
at the mouth of the Ganges, to be devoured by the
alligators. In China Christianity has performed for
infancy the same humane duty as in ancient Rome,
as many of the converts made by the Jesuits consisted
of foundlings whom they had picked up when
cast forth by their parents to perish in the streets.
128
To quit, however, this melancholy topic: while the
poor, as we have seen, were driven by despair to imbrue
their hands in the blood of their offspring, their
more wealthy neighbours celebrated the birth of a
child[373] with a succession of banquets and rejoicings.
Of these, the first was held on the fifth day from the
birth, when took place the ceremony called Amphidromia,
confounded by some ancient authors with the
festival of the tenth day.[374] On this occasion the
accoucheuse or the nurse, to whose care the child
was now definitively consigned,[375] having purified her
hands with water,[376] ran naked[377] with the infant in
her arms, and accompanied by all the other females
of the family, in the same state, round the hearth,[378]
which was regarded as the altar of Hestia, the Vesta
of the Romans. By this ceremony the child was
initiated in the rites of religion and placed under
the protection of the fire goddess, probably with the
same view that infants are baptized among us.
Meanwhile the passer-by was informed that a fifth-day
feast was celebrating within, by symbols suspended
on the street-door, which, in case of a boy, consisted
129in an olive crown; and of a lock of wool, alluding to
her future occupations, when it was a girl.[379] Athenæus,
apropos of cabbage, which was eaten on this
occasion, as well as by ladies “in the straw,”[380] as
conducing to create milk, quotes a comic description
of the Amphidromia from a drama of Ephippos,
which proves they were well acquainted with the
arts of joviality.
“How is it
No wreathed garland decks the festive door,
No savoury odour creeps into the nostrils
Since ’tis a birth-feast? Custom, sooth, requires
Slices of rich cheese from the Chersonese,
Toasted and hissing; cabbage too in oil,
Fried brown and crisp, with smothered breast of lamb.
Chaffinches, turtle-doves, and good fat thrushes
Should now be feathered; rows of merry guests
Pick clean the bones of cuttle-fish together,
Gnaw the delicious feet of polypi,
And drink large draughts of scarcely mingled wine.
[381]”
A sacrifice[382] was likewise this day offered up for the
life of the child, probably to the god Amphidromos,
first mentioned, and therefore supposed to have been
invented by Æschylus.[383] It has moreover been imagined
that the name was now imposed, and gifts were
presented by the friends and household slaves.[384]
But it was on the seventh day that the child generally
received its name,[385] amid the festivities of another
banquet; though sometimes this was deferred till the
tenth.[386] The reason is supplied by Aristotle.[387] They
delayed the naming thus long, he says, because most
children that perish in extreme infancy die before the
seventh day, which being passed they considered their
lives more secure. The eighth day was chosen by
other persons for bestowing the name, and, this considered
130the natal day, was solemnized annually as
the anniversary of its birth, on which occasion it was
customary for the friends of the family to assemble
together, and present gifts to the child, consisting
sometimes of the polypi and cuttle-fish[388] to be eaten
at the feast. However the tenth day[389] appears to have
been very commonly observed. Thus Euripides:[390]
“Say, who delighting in a mother’s claim
Mid tenth-day feasts bestowed the ancestral name?”
Aristophanes, too, on the occasion of naming his
Bird-city, which a hungry poet pretends to have long
ago celebrated, introduces Peisthetæros saying,
“What! have I not but now the sacrifice
Of the tenth day completed and bestowed
A name as on a child?”
[391]
Connected with this custom, there is a very good
anecdote in Polyænos, from which Meursius[392] infers
that there existed among the Greeks something like
the office of sponsor. Jason, tyrant of Pheræ, most of
whose stratagems were played off against members of
his own family, had a brother named Meriones, extremely
opulent, but to the last degree close-fisted,
particularly towards him. When at length a son was
born to Jason, he invited to the Nominalia many
principal nobles of Thessaly, and among others his
brother Meriones, who was to preside over the ceremonies.
In these he was probably occupied the
whole day, during which, under pretence, apparently,
of providing some choice game for his guests, the
tyrant went out for a few hours with his dogs and
usual followers. His real object, however, soon appeared.
Making direct for Pagasæ, where his brother’s
castle stood, he stormed the place, and seizing
on Meriones’ treasures, to the amount of twenty
talents, returned in all speed to the banquet. Here,
131by way of showing his fraternal consideration, he delegated
to his brother the honour of pouring forth
the libations, and bestowing the name, which was the
father’s prerogative. But Meriones receiving from
one of the tyrant’s attendants a hint of what had
taken place, called the boy “Porthaon,” or the “Plunderer.”[393]
At Athens the feast and sacrifice took place
at night, with much pomp, and all the glee which such
an occasion was calculated to inspire.[394]
On the bestowing of the name Potter’s information
is particularly full. He is probably right, too, in his
conjecture, that in most countries the principal object
of calling together so great a number of friends to
witness this ceremony was to prevent such controversies
as might arise when the child came out into
the business of the world. But at Athens the Act of
Registration[395] rendered such witnesses scarcely necessary.
The right of imposing the name belonged, as
hinted above, to the father, who likewise appears to
have possessed the power afterwards to alter it if he
thought proper. They were compelled to follow no
exact precedent; but the general rule resembled one
apparently observed by nature, which, neglecting the
likeness in the first generation, sometimes reproduces
it with extraordinary fidelity in the second. Thus, the
grandson inheriting often the features, inherited also
very generally the name of his grandfather,[396] and precisely
the same rule applied to women; the granddaughter
nearly always receiving her grandmother’s
name.[397] Thus, Andocides, son of Leagoras, bore the
name of his grandfather; the father and son of
Miltiades were named Cimon; the father and son of
Hipponicos, Cleinias.[398] The orator Lysias formed an
exception to this rule, his grandfather’s name having
132been Lysanias.[399] In short, though there existed no law
upon the subject, yet ancient and nearly invariable
custom operated with the force of law.[400]
The names of children were often in remote antiquity
derived from some circumstance attending
their birth, or in the history of their parents. Sometimes,
too, their own deeds, as in the case of modern
titles, procured them a name; or perhaps some misfortune
which befell them. Thus, Marpissa, in Homer,
being borne away[401] by Apollo, obtained the name of
Halcyone, because her mother, like the Halcyon, was
inconsolable for the loss of her offspring.[402] Scamandrios,
son of Hector, was denominated Astyanax, because his
father was τοῦ ἄστεος ἄναξ, “the defender of the city;”[403]
and Odysseus, metamorphosed by the Romans into
Ulysses, is supposed to have been so called τοῦ ἄστεος ἄναξ
διὰ τὸ ὀδυσσέσθαι τοῦ Αὐτολυκου, from the anger of Autolychos.[404]
Again, the son of Achilles, at first called Pyrrhos, as
our second William, Rufus, from the colour of his hair,
afterwards obtained the name of Neoptolemos, “the
youthful warrior,” from his engaging at a very early
age in the siege of Troy. It came, in aftertimes, to
be considered indecorous for persons of humble condition
to assume the names of heroic families. Thus,
the low flatterer Callicrates, at the court of Ptolemy
the Third, was thought to be audacious because he
bestowed upon his son and daughter the names of
Telegonos and Anticleia, and wore the effigy of Odysseus
in his ring, which appeared to be claiming kindred
with that illustrious chief. In fact, to prevent the profanation
of revered names, the law itself forbade them
to be adopted by slaves or females of bad character,[405]
though, in defiance of its enactments, we find there
were hetairæ, who derived their appellation from the
133sacred games of Greece, Nemeas, Isthmias, and Pythionica.[406]
But of this enough: we now proceed to the management
and education of children, beginning with
their earliest infancy. In old times the women of
Greece always suckled their own offspring, and for
the performance of this office they were excellently
adapted by nature,[407] since they had no sooner become
mothers than their breasts filled so copiously with
milk than it not only flowed through the nipple, but
likewise transpired through the whole bosom. On the
little derangements of the system peculiar to nurses the
Greeks entertained many superstitious opinions; for
instance, they conceived those thread-like indurations
which sometimes appear in the breasts to be caused
by swallowing hairs, which afterwards come forth with
the milk, on which account the disorder was called
Trichiasis.[408] The nourishment supplied by mothers
so robust and lactiferous was often so rich and abundant
as, like over-feeding, to cause spasms and convulsions,
supposed to be most violent when they happened
during the full moon, and began in the back.
The usual remedy among nurses would appear to have
been wine, since Aristotle,[409] in speaking of the disorder,
observes that white, particularly if diluted with
water, is less injurious than red, though even from
the former he thought it better to abstain. The administering
of aperient medicines and the absence
from everything that could cause flatulence, he considered
the only safe treatment. Nurses, however,
sometimes placed much reliance on the brains of a
rabbit.[410]
In Plato’s Republic the nurses were to live apart
134in a distinct quarter of the city, and suckle indiscriminately
all the children that were to be preserved; no
mother being permitted to know her own child.[411]
Every one must have observed, as well as Plato,[412]
that children are no sooner born than they exhibit unequivocal
signs of passion and anger, in the moderating
and directing of which consists the chiefest difficulty
of education. Most men, through the defect of nature
or early discipline, live long before they acquire
this mastery, which many never attain at all. Generally,
however, where it is possessed, much may certainly
be attributed to that training which begins at
the birth, so that of all the instruments employed in
the[413] forming of character, the nurse is probably the
most important. Of this the ancients generally appear
to have been convinced, and most of all the Spartans
and Athenians. The Lacedæmonian nurses, on whom
the force of discipline had been tried, enjoyed a high
reputation throughout Greece, and were particularly
esteemed at Athens.[414] They no doubt deserved it. To
them may be traced the first attempt to dispense with
those swathes and bandages which in other countries
confined the limbs, and impeded the movements of infants,
and by their skilful and enlightened treatment,
combined with watchfulness and tender solicitude, they
are said to have preserved their little charges from
135those distortions so common among children. But
their cares extended beyond the person. They aimed
at forming the manners, regulating the temper, laying
the foundation of virtuous habits, at sowing in short
the seeds, which in after life, might ripen into a manly,
frank, and generous character. In the matter of food,
in the regulating of which, as Locke confesses, there
is much difficulty, the Spartan nurses acted up to the
suggestions of the sternest philosophy, accustoming the
children under their charge, to be content with whatever
was put before them, and to endure occasional privations
without murmuring. Over the fear of ghosts
too they triumphed. Empusa and the Mormolukeion,
and all those other hideous spectres which childhood associates
with the idea of darkness, yielded to the discipline
of the Spartan nurse.[415] Her charge would remain
alone or in the dark, without terror, and the same stern
system, which overcame the first offspring of superstition,
likewise subdued the moral defects of peevishness,
frowardness, and the habit of whining and mewling,
which when indulged in render children a nuisance to
all around them. No wonder therefore, these Doric
disciplinarians were everywhere in request. At Athens
it became fashionable among the opulent to employ
them, and Cleinias, as is well known, placed under the
care of one of these she-pædagogues that Alcibiades,
whose ambitious character, to be curbed by no restraints
of discipline or philosophy, proved the ruin
of his country and the scourge of Greece.[416]
Plato, however, while framing at will an imaginary
system, and though inclined upon the whole to laconise,
adheres, in some respects, to the customs of his
country, and ordains that infants be confined by swaddling
136bands till two years old. From the mention of
this age, it may be inferred that children commonly
did not walk much earlier at Athens, which is the
case in the East, as we may learn from the story of
Ala-ed-deen Abushamet. Plato would also have nurses
to be vigorous and robust women, much inclined to
frequent the temples, in order, probably, to introduce
into the minds of their charges early impressions of
religion, and to stroll about the fields and public gardens
until the children could run alone; and even
then, and until they were three years old, he urged the
necessity of their being frequently carried, to prevent
crooked legs and malformed ankles. But because all
this might press hard on one nurse, several were employed,
as among ourselves,[417] and a kind of Nursery
Governess overlooked the whole. The Gerula or under-nurse
was, in later times, the person upon whom
fell the principal labour of bearing the infant about;
but in remoter ages the Greeks, more particularly
their royal and noble families, employed in this capacity
a Baioulos[418] or nurse-father, who, as in the case
of Phœnix, was sometimes himself of illustrious birth.
Cheiron, too, the Pelasgian mountain prince, performed
this sacred office for the son of his friend Peleus.
Our readers, we trust, will not be reluctant to enter
a Greek nursery,[419] where the mother, whatever might
be the number of her assistants, generally suckled her
own children. Their cradles were of various forms,
some of which like our own required rocking,[420] while
others were suspended like sailors’ hammocks from the
ceiling, and swung gently to and fro when they desired
to pacify the child or lull it to sleep:[421] as Tithonos
is represented in the mythology to have been suspended
137in his old age.[422] Other cradles there were in
the shape of little portable baskets wherein they were
carried from one part of the harem to another.[423] It is
probable, too, that as in the East the children of the
opulent were rocked in their cradles wrapped in
coverlets of Milesian wool.
Occasionally in Hellas,[424] as everywhere else, the
nurse’s milk would fail, or be scanty, when they had
recourse to a very original contrivance to still the
infant’s cries; they dipped a piece of sponge in honey
which was given it to suck.[425] It was probably under
similar circumstances that children were indulged in
figs; the Greeks entertaining an opinion that this
fruit greatly contributed to render them plump and
healthy. They had further a superstition that by
rubbing fresh figs upon the eyes of children they
would be preserved from ophthalmia.[426]
The Persians attributed the same preventive power
to the petals of the new-blown rose.[427] When a child
was wholly or partly dry-nursed, the girl who had
charge of it would under pretence of cooling its pap,
commonly made of fine flour of spelt,[428] put the spoon
into her own mouth, swallow the best part of the nourishment,
and give the refuse to the infant, a practice
attributed by Aristophanes to Cleon, who swallowed,
he says, the best of the good things of the state himself,
and left the residue to the people.[429]
All the world over the singing of the nurse has
been proverbial. Music breathes its sweetest notes
around our cradles. The voice of woman soothes our
infancy and our age, and in Greece, where every class
of the community had its song, the nurse naturally
138vindicated one to herself.[430] This sweetest of all melodies—
“Redolent of joy and youth”
was technically denominated Katabaukalesis, of which
scraps and fragments only, like those of the village
song which lingered in the memory of Rousseau, have
come down to us. The first verse of a Roman nursery
air, which still, Pignorius[431] tells us, was sung in his
time by the mothers of Italy, ran thus:—
“Lalla, Lalla; dorme aut lacte.
Lalla, Lalla; sleep or suck.”
The Sicilian poet, whose pictures of the ancient
world are still so fresh and fragrant, has bequeathed
to us a Katabaukalesis of extreme beauty and brevity
which I have here paraphrastically translated:[432]—
“Sleep ye, that in my breast have lain,
The slumber sweet and light,
And wake, my glorious twins, again
To glad your mother’s sight.
O happy, happy be your dreams,
And blest your waking be,
When morning’s gold and ruddy beams
Restore your smiles to me.”
[433]
The philosopher Chrysippos[434] considered it of importance
to regulate the songs of nurses, and Quintilian,[435]
with a quaint but pardonable enthusiasm, would
139have the boy who is designed to be an orator placed
under the care of a nurse of polished language and
superior mind. He observes,[436] too, that children
suckled and brought up by dumb nurses, will remain
themselves dumb, which would necessarily
happen had they no other person with whom to
converse. When the infant was extremely wakeful
the soothing influence of the song was heightened
by the aid of little timbrels and rattles hung
with bells.
A very characteristic anecdote is told of Anacreon
apropos of nurses.[437] A good-humoured wench with a
child in her arms happening one day to be sauntering
more nutricum, through the Panionion, or Grand
Agora of Ionia, encountered the Teïan poet, who
returning from the Bacchic Olympos, found the
streets much too narrow for him, and went reeling
hither and thither as if determined to make the most
of his walk. The nurse, it is to be presumed, felt
no inclination to dispute the passage with him; but
Anacreon attracted, perhaps, by her pretty face,
making a timely lurch, sent both her and her charge
spinning off the pavement, at the same time muttering
something disrespectful against “the brat.” Now,
for her own part, the girl felt no resentment against
him, for she could see which of the divinities was to
blame; but loving, as a nurse should, her boy, she
prayed that the poet might one day utter many words
in praise of him whom he had so rudely vituperated;
which came to pass accordingly, for the infant was the
celebrated Cleobulos, whose beauty the Teïan afterwards
celebrated in many an ode.[438]
Traces of the remotest antiquity still linger in the
nursery. The word baby, which we bestow familiarly
on an infant, was with little variation, in use many
thousand years ago among the Syrians, in whose nursery
140dialect babia[439] had the same signification. Tatta,
too, pappa and mamma[440] were the first words lisped by the
children of Hellas. And from various hints dropped
by ancient authors, it seems clear that the same wild
stories and superstitions that still flourish there haunted
the nursery of old. The child was taught to dread
Empusa or Onoskelis or Onoskolon,[441] the monster with
one human foot and one of brass, which dwelt among
the shades of night and glided through dusky chambers
and dismal passages to devour “naughty children.”
The fables which filled up this obscure part of Hellenic
mythology, were scarcely less wild than those
the Arabs tell about their Marids, their Efreets, and
their Jinn; for Empusa, the phantom minister of
Hecate,[442] could assume every various form of God’s
creatures, appearing sometimes as a bull, or a tree,
or an ass, or a stone, or a fly, or a beautiful woman.[443]
Shakspeare, having caught, perhaps, some glimpse of
this superstition, or inventing in a kindred spirit,
attributes a similar power of transformation to his
mischievous elf in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, located
on Empusa’s native soil.
“I’ll follow you, I’ll lead you about, around,
Through bog, through bush, through brake, through briar.
141Sometimes a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometimes a fire,
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire at every turn.”
It was this spectral being that was said to appear
to those who performed the sacrifices to the dead,
to men overwhelmed with misfortune,[444] and travellers
in remote and dismal roads; as happened to the companions
of Apollonios of Tyana who, in journeying on
a bright moonlight night, were startled by the appearance
of Empusa, which having stood twice or thrice in
their way, suddenly vanished.[445] To protect themselves
against this demon the superstitious were accustomed
to wear about them a piece of jasper, either set in a
ring, or suspended from the neck.[446]
The Lamia, too, fierce and beautiful, the ancestress of
our “White ladies,” and of the Katakhanas or Vampire
of the modern Greeks, roamed through solitary places
to terrify, delude, or destroy good folks, big or little,
who might lose their way amid moonlit crags or
shores made white with bones and sea-shells. They
loved to relate “around the fire o’ nights,” how Lamia
had once been a beautiful woman caressed and made
the mother of a fair son by Zeus; how Hera through
jealousy had destroyed the boy; and how, thereupon
Lamia took to the bush and devoted her wretched
immortality to the destroying of other women’s children.[447]
According to another form of the tradition
there were many Lamiæ, so called from having capacious
jaws, inhabiting the Libyan coast,[448] somewhere
about the Great Syrtis, in the midst of sand hills,
rocks, and wastes of irreclaimable aridity. Formed
above like women of surpassing beauty, they terminated
below in serpents. Their voice was like the
142hissing of an adder, and whatever approached them
they devoured.[449]
Another race of wild and grotesque spirits were
the Kobaloi,[450] companions of Dionysos, who doubtless
subsist still in our woods and forests under the name
of goblins and hobgoblins. Our Elves and Trolls
and Fairies appear likewise to belong to the same
brood, though in these northern latitudes, they have
become less mischievous and more romantic, delighting
the eyes of the wayfarers by their frolics and
gambols, instead of devouring him.
“Fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side,
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course; they on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear,
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.”
Though, as we have seen, weak children were unscrupulously
sacrificed at Sparta, they still made offerings
to the gods in favour of the strong. The ceremony
took place annually during certain festivals, denominated
Tithenidia,[451] when, in a moment of hospitality, they
not only made merry themselves, but overlooked their
xenelasia, and entertained generously all such strangers
as happened to be present. The banquet given on this
occasion was called Kopis, and, in preparation for it,
tents were pitched on the banks of the Tiasa near the
temple of Artemis Corythalis. Within these, beds
formed of heaps of herbs were piled up and covered
with carpets. On the day of the festival the nurses
proceeded thither with the male children in their arms,
and, presenting them to the goddess, offered up as victims
a number of sucking pigs. In the feast which ensued
loaves baked in an oven, in lieu of the extemporary
cake, were served up to the guests. Choruses
of Corythalistriæ or dancing girls, likewise performed
143in honour of the goddess; and in some places persons,
called Kyrittoi, in wooden masks, made sport for the
guests.[452] Probably it may have been on occasions such
as this that the nurses, like her in Romeo and Juliet,
gave free vent to their libertine tongues, and indulged
in those appellations which the tolerant literature of
antiquity has preserved.[453]
When children were to be weaned, they spread, as
the moderns do, something bitter over the nipple,[454]
that the young republican might learn early how—
“Full in the fount of joy’s delicious springs
Some bitter o’er the flower its bubbling venom flings.”
144
Having described, as far as possible, the management
of infants and young children, it may not be
uninteresting to notice briefly their toys, sports, and
pastimes; for, though children have been substantially
the same in all ages and countries, the forms of their
amusements have been infinitely varied, and where
they have resembled each other it is not the less instructive
to note that resemblance. The ancients[455]
have, however, bequeathed us but little information
respecting the fragile implements wherewith the
happiness of the nursery was in great part erected.
Even respecting the recreations which succeeded and
amused the leisure of boys our materials for working
out a picture are scanty, so that we must content ourselves
with little more than an outline. Nevertheless,
though the accounts they have transmitted to posterity
are meagre, they attached much importance to the
subject itself; so that the greatest legislators and philosophers
condescended to make regulations respecting
145it. Thus Plato, with a view of generating a profound
reverence for ancient national institutions, forbade
even the recreations of boys to be varied with reckless
fickleness; for the habit of innovation once introduced
into the character would ever after continue to influence
it, so that they who in boyhood altered their
sports without reason, would without scruple in manhood
extend their daring hands to the laws and institutions
of their country.[456]
Amongst the Hellenes the earliest toy consisted, as
in most other countries, of the rattle, said to be the
invention of the philosopher Archytas.[457] To this succeeded
balls of many colours,[458] with little chariots,
sometimes purchased at Athens in the fair held during
the feast of Zeus.[459] The common price of a plaything
of this kind would appear to have been an
obolos. The children themselves, as without any authority
might with certainty be inferred, employed
their time in erecting walls with sand,[460] in constructing
little houses,[461] in building and carving ships, in cutting
carts or chariots out of leather, in fashioning pomegranate
rinds into the shape of frogs,[462] and in forming
with wax a thousand diminutive images, which pursued
afterwards during school hours subjected them
occasionally to severe chastisement.[463]
Another amusement which the children of Hellas
shared with their elders was that afforded by puppets,[464]
which were probably an invention of the remotest
antiquity. Numerous women appear to have earned
146their livelihood by carrying round from village to village
these ludicrous and frolicsome images, which
were usually about a cubit in height, and may be regarded
as the legitimate ancestors of Punch and Judy.
By touching a single string, concealed from the spectators,
the operator could put her mute performers in
action, cause them to move every limb in succession,
spread forth the hands, shrug the shoulders, turn
round the neck, roll the eyes, and appear to look at
the audience.[465] After this, by other contrivances
within the images, they could be made to go through
many humorous evolutions resembling the movements
of the dance. These exhibitors, frequently of
the male sex, were known by the name of Neurospastæ.
This art passed, together with other Grecian
inventions, into Italy, where it was already familiar
to the public in the days of Horace, who, in speaking
of princes governed by favourites, compares them to
puppets in the hands of the showman.
“Tu, mihi qui imperitas, aliis servis miser; atque
Duceris, ut nervis alienis mobile lignum.”[466]
A very extraordinary puppet, in the form of a silver
skeleton, was, according to Petronius Arbiter,[467] exhibited
at the court of Nero; for, like the Egyptians,
this imperial profligate appears to have been excited
147to sensual indulgences by the remembrance of the
grave: “Let us eat and drink,” cried he, “for tomorrow
we die.” The skeleton being placed upon the
table, in the midst of the tyrant’s orgies, threw its
limbs strangely about, and bent its form into various
attitudes with wonderful flexibility, which having performed
once and again, and then suddenly ceasing to
move, the master of the feast exclaimed, “Alas, alas!
what a mere nothing is man! Like unto this must we
all be when Orcus shall have borne us hence. Therefore
let us live while enjoyment is in our power.”
But to return to the children of Hellas. Among the
earliest sports of the Greek boy was whipping the
bembyx or top,[468] which would appear to have been
usually practised in those open spaces occurring at the
junction of several roads:—
“Where three ways meet there boys with tops are found,
That ply the lash and urge them round and round.”
[469]
Sometimes also, as with us, they spun their tops with
cord. The amusement is thus described by Tibullus:[470]
“Namque agor, ut per plana citus tota verbere turben,
Quem celer assuetâ versitat arte puer.”
The hoop, too, so familiar to our own schoolboys,
formed one of the playthings of Hellenic children. It
was sometimes made of bronze, about three feet in
diameter,[471] and adorned with little spherical bells and
movable rings, which jingled as it rolled. The instrument
employed to urge
“the rolling circle’s speed,”
as Gray expresses it, in his reminiscences of the Eton
play-ground, was crooked at the point, and called a
plectron: its exact representation may any day, in the
proper season, be seen in the streets of London impelling
forward the iron hoop of our own children.
148The passages of ancient authors, in which mention of
the trochos occurs, appear to have been imperfectly
understood before the discovery of a basso-rilievo, in
marble, on the road from Rome to Tivoli, afterwards
removed to the vineyard of the Cardinal Alexander
Albani. On certain engraved gems also, in the cabinet
of Stosch, are several representations of boys playing
at hoop, where the trochos in some cases reaches
to the waist, in others to the breast, and where the
child is very small up to the chin. It has been conjectured
by Winkelmann,[472] that a circle represented in
one of the paintings of Herculaneum was no other
than an ancient trochos. Rolling the hoop formed a
part of the exercises of the palæstra, which were performed
even by very young children. Thus we find
the nurse describing the sons of Medeia returning from
playing at hoop the very day that they were slain by
their mother.[473] This amusement has been described
briefly by the Roman poets. Thus Martial:[474]—
“Garrulus in laxo cur annulus orbe vagatur
Cedat, et argutis obvia turba trochis.”
Propertius[475] notices the crooked form of the plectron,
or clavis:—
“Increpat et versi clavis adunca trochi.”
Horace[476] likewise alludes to the game:—
“Indoctusque pilæ discive trochive quiescit.”
This poet clearly informs us that the Romans received
the game from the Greeks:[477]—
“Ludere doctior,
Seu Græco jubeas trocho,
Seu malis vetita legibus alea.”
Another less innocent amusement was[478] spinning goldchafers,
which appears to have afforded the Greek
149urchins the same delight as tormenting cockchafers
does their successors of the north. This species of
beetle making its appearance when the apple-trees
were in bloom, was therefore called Melolanthe, or
apple-blossom. Having caught it, and tied a linen
thread about its feet, it was let loose, and the fun was
to see it move in spiral lines through the air as it was
twisted by the thread.[479]
It was the practice among the children of Greece,
when the sun happened to be obscured by a cloud,
to exclaim, “Ἔξεχ᾽ ὦ φίλ᾽ ἥλιε!”—“Come forth, beloved
sun!” Strattis makes allusion to this custom in
a fragment of his Phœnissæ:—
“Then the god listened to the shouting boys,
When they exclaimed, ‘Come forth, beloved sun!’”
[480]
It is fortunate that our English boys have no such
passion for sunshine; otherwise, as Phœbos Apollo
hides his face for months together in this blessed climate,
we should be in a worse plight than Dionysos
among the frogs of Acheron, when his passion for
Euripides led him to pay a visit to Persephone. In
some parts of the country, however, the children have
a rude distich which they frequently bawl in chorus,
when in summer-time their sports are interrupted by
a long-continued shower:—
“Rain, rain, go to Spain;
Fair weather, come again.”
The Muïnda was our “Blindman’s-buff,” “Blind
Hob,” “Hobble ’em-blind,” and “Hood-man-blind,” in
which, as with us, a boy moved about with his eyes
bandaged, spreading forth his hands, and crying “Beware!”
If he caught any of those who were skipping
around him, the captive was compelled to enact the
blind-man in his stead. Another form of the game
was for the seers to hide, and the blind man to grope
150round till he found them; the whole probably being a
rude representation of Polyphemos in his cave searching
for the Greeks who had blinded him. A third
form was, for the bystanders to strike or touch the
blindfolded boy until he could declare who had touched
him, when the person indicated took his place. To
this the Roman soldiers alluded when they blindfolded
our Saviour and smote him, and cried, “Prophesy who
struck thee.”[481] In the Kollabismos,[482] the Capifolèt of
the French, one person covered his eyes with his own
hands, the other then gave him a gentle blow, and the
point was, for the blindfolded man to guess with which
hand he had been stricken. The Χαλκὴ Μυῖα,[483] or Brazen
Fly, was a variety of Blindman’s-buff, in which a
boy, having his eyes bound with a fillet, went groping
round, calling out, “I am seeking the Brazen Fly.”
His companions replied, “You may seek, but you will
not find it”—at the same time striking him with
cords made of the inner bark of the papyros; and thus
they proceeded till one of them was taken. Apodidraskinda
(“hide and seek,” or “whoop and holloa!”)
was played much as it is now. One boy shut his eyes,
or they were kept closed for him by one of his suspicious
companions, while the others went to hide. He
then sallied forth in search of the party who lay concealed,
while each of them endeavoured to gain the
post of the seeker; and the first who did this turned
him out and took his place.
Another game was the Ephedrismos, in which a
stone called the Dioros was set up at a certain distance,
and aimed at with bowls or stones. The one who
missed took the successful player upon his back, and
was compelled to carry him about blindfolded, until
he went straight from the standing-point to the Dioros.
151This latter part of the game has been described by
several ancient authors, under the appellation of Encotyle,
though they are rightly, by Hesychius,[484] considered
as different parts of the same sport. The variety
called Encotyle,—the “Pick-back” or “Pick-a-back,”
of English boys, consisted in one lad’s placing
his hands behind his back, and receiving therein the
knees of his conqueror, who, putting his fingers over
the bearer’s eyes, drove him about at his pleasure.
This game was also called the Kubesinda and Hippas,[485]
though, according to the conjecture of Dr. Hyde, the
latter name signified rather our game of “Leap-frog,”—the
“mazidha” of the Persians, in which a number
of boys stooped down with the hands resting on
the knees, in a row, the last going over the backs of
all the others, and then standing first.
In the game called Chytrinda, in English[486] “Hot-cockles,”
“Selling of pears,” or “How many plumbs
for a penny,” one boy sat on the ground, and was
called the chytra or pot, while his companions, forming
themselves into a ring, ran round, plucking, pinching,
or striking him as they went. If he who enacted the
chytra succeeded in seizing upon one of the buffeters
the captive took his place. Possibly it was during
this play that a mischievous foundling, contrary to
rule, poking, as he ran round, the boy in the centre
with his foot, provoked from the latter the sarcastic
inquiry, “What! dost thou kick thy mother in the
belly?” alluding to the circumstance of the former
having been exposed in a chytra.[487] Another form of
the Chytrinda required the lad in the centre to move
about with a pot on his head, where he held it with
his left hand, while the others struck him, and cried
out, “Who has the pot?” To which he replied, “I
Midas,” endeavouring all the while to reach some one
with his foot,—the first whom he thus touched being
compelled to carry round the pot in his stead.[488]
152Another game, peculiar to girls, was the Cheli Chelone,
or “the tortoise,” of which I remember no representative
among English pastimes. It somewhat
resembled the Chytrinda of the boys. For one girl sat
on the ground and was called the tortoise, while her
companions, running round, inquired “Tor-tortoise
what art thou doing there in the middle?” “Spinning
wool,” replied she, “the thread of the Milesian
woof;” “And how, continued they, was thy son engaged
when he perished?” “He sprang from his
white steeds into the sea.”[489] If this was, as the language
would intimate, a Dorian play, I should consider
it a practical satire on the habits of the other Hellenic
women, who remained like tortoises at home, carding
and spinning, while their sons engaged in the exercises
of the palæstra or the stadium. Possibly, also, originally
the name may have had some connection with
καλλιχέλωνος “beautiful tortoise,” the figure of this
animal having been impressed on the money of the
Peloponnesians; in fact, in a fragment of the Helots
of Eupolis, we find the obolos distinguished by the
epithet of καλλιχέλωνος.[490]
The Kynitinda was so called from the verb κυνέω to
kiss, as appears from Crates in his “Games,” a play
in which the poet contrived to introduce an account of
this and nearly all the other juvenile pastimes. The
form of the sport being little known, the learned have
sometimes confounded it with a kind of salute called
the chytra in antiquity, and the “Florentine Kiss”
in modern Italy, in which the person kissing took the
other by the ears. Giraldi[491] says he remembers, when
a boy, that his father and other friends, when kissing
him, used sometimes to take hold of both his ears,
which they called giving a “Florentine kiss.” He
afterwards was surprised to find that this was a most
ancient practice, commemorated both by the Greek
153and Latin authors. It obtained its name, as he conjectures,
from the earthen vessel called chytra, which
had two handles usually laid hold of by persons drinking
out of it, as is still the practice with similar
utensils in Spain. This writer mentions a present
sent from the peninsula to Leo X, consisting of a
great number of chytræ of red pottery, if we may
so call them, of which he himself obtained one.
Crates, as Hemsterhuis[492] ingeniously supposes, introduced
a wanton woman playing at this game among
the youths in order that she might enjoy the kisses of
the handsome.
The Epostrakismos[493] was what English boys call
“Ducks and Drakes,” and sometimes, among our ancestors
at least, “A duck and a drake and a white
penny cake,” and was played with oyster-shells.
Standing on the shore of the sea at the Peiræeus,
for example, they flung the shells edgeways over the
water so that they should strike it and bound upwards
again and again from its surface. The boy
whose shell made most leaps before sinking, won
the game. Minucius Felix gives a very pretty description
of this juvenile sport. “Behold, he says,
boys playing in frolicsome rivalry with shells on
the sea-shore. The game consists in picking up
from the beach a shell rendered light by the constant
action of the waves, and standing on an even
place, and inclining the body, holding the shell flat
between the fingers, and throwing it with the greatest
possible force, so that it may rase the surface
of the sea or skim along while it moves with gentle
flow, or glances over the tops of the waves as they
leap up in its track. That boy is esteemed the
victor whose shell performs the longest journey or
makes most leaps before sinking.”[494]
The Akinetinda was a contention between boys, in
which some one of them endeavoured to maintain his
154position unmoved. Good sport must have been produced
by the next game called Schœnophilinda, or
“Hiding the Rope.” In this a number of boys sat
down in a circle, one of whom had a rope concealed
about his person, which he endeavoured to drop secretly
beside one of his companions. If he succeeded,
the unlucky wight was started like a hare round
the circle, his enemy following and laying about
his shoulders. But on the other hand, if he against
whom the plot was laid detected it, he obtained possession
of the rope and enjoyed the satisfaction of flogging
the plotter over the same course.
The Basilinda[495] was a game in which one obtained
by lot the rank of king, and the vanquished, whether
one or many, became subject to him, to do whatever
he should order. It passed down to the Christians,
and was more especially practised during the feast of
the Epiphany. It is commonly known under the
name of Forfeits, and was formerly called “One penny,”
“One penny come after me,” “Questions and
commands,” “The choosing of king and queen on
Twelfth night.” In the last-mentioned sense it is
still prevalent in France, where it is customary for
bakers to make a present to the families they serve,
of a large cake in the form of a ring in which a small
kidney bean has been concealed. The cake is cut up,
the pieces are distributed to the company, and the
person who gets the bean is king of the feast. This
game entered in Greece likewise into the amusements
of grown people, both men and women, as well as of
children, and an anecdote, connected with it, is told of
Phryne, who happened one day to be at a mixed party
where it was played. By chance it fell to her lot to
play the queen; upon which, observing that her female
companions were rouged and lilied to the eyes,
she maliciously ordered a basin and towel to be
brought in, and that every woman should wash her
face. Conscious of her own native beauty, she began
155the operation, and only appeared the fresher and more
lovely. But alas for the others! When the anchusa,
psimmuthion, and phukos had been removed by the
water, their freckled and coarse skins exposed them
to general laughter.[496]
The Ostrakinda was a game purely juvenile. A
knot of boys having drawn a line on the ground,
separated into two parties. A small earthenware
disk or ostrakon, one side black with pitch, the other
white, was then produced, and each party chose a side,
white or black. The disk was then pitched along the
line, and the party whose side came up was accounted
victorious, and prepared to pursue while the others
turned round and fled. The boy first caught obtained
the name of the ass, and was compelled to sit down,
the game apparently proceeding till all were thus
caught and placed hors de combat. He who threw
the ostrakon cried, “night or day,” the black side
being termed night, and the opposite day. It was
called the “Twirling of the ostrakon.” Plato alludes
to it in the Phædros.[497]
The Dielkustinda, “French and English,” was
played chiefly in the palæstra, and occasionally elsewhere.
It consisted simply in two parties of boys
laying hold of each other by the hand, and pulling
till one by one the stronger had drawn over the
weaker to their side of the ground.
The Phryginda was a game in which, holding a
number of smooth and delicate fragments of pottery
between the fingers of the left hand, they struck them
in succession with the right so as apparently to produce
a kind of music.[498]
There was another game called Kyndalismos, played
with short batons, and requiring considerable strength
and quickness of eye. A stick having been fixed up-right
156in a loose moist soil, the business was to dislodge
it by throwing at it other batons from a distance;
whence the proverb, “Nail is driven out by nail, and
baton by baton.”[499] A person who played at this game
was called by some of the Doric poets Kyndalopactes.[500]
A similar game is played in England, in which the
prize is placed upon the top of the upright stick.
The player wins when the prize falls without the hole
whence the upright has been dislodged.
The game of Ascoliasmos[501] branched off into several
varieties, and afforded the Athenian rustics no small
degree of sport. The first and most simple form consisted
in hopping on one foot, sometimes in pairs, to
see which in this way could go furthest. On other occasions
the hopper undertook to overtake certain of his
companions who were allowed the use of both legs.
If he could touch one of them he came off conqueror.
This variety of the game appears to have been the
Empusæ ludus of the Romans. “Scotch hoppers,”
or “Fox to thy hole,” in which boys, hopping on one
leg, beat one another with gloves or pieces of leather
tied at the end of strings, or knotted handkerchiefs, as
in the diable boîteux of the French. At other times
victory depended on the number of hops, all hopping
together and counting their springs,—the highest of
course winning. But the most amusing variety of the
game was that practised during the Dionysiac festival
of the Askolia. Skins filled with wine or inflated
with air, and extremely well oiled, were placed upon
the ground, and on these the shoeless rustics leaped
with one leg and endeavoured to maintain a footing,
which they seldom could on account of their slipperiness.
However, he who succeeded carried off the
skin of wine as his prize.
157A game, evidently also of rustics, was the Trygodiphesis,
Tantali ludus, “Bobbing for cherries,” “Bob
cherry,” in which something very nice was thrown
into a bowl of wine lees, which the performer, with
his hands behind his back, was to fish up with his
lips. The fun was to see the ludicrous figure he
cut with his face daubed and discoloured by the lees.
Phitta Maliades, Phitta Meliai, Phitta Rhoiai,
“Hasten, nymphs!” may be regarded as exclamations
of encouragement uttered by Dorian girls, when engaged
in a race.[502]
Playing at ball was common, and received various
names. Episkyros, Phæninda, Aporraxis and Ourania.
The first of these games was also known by the
names of the Ephebike and the Epikoinos. It was
played thus: a number of young men assembling together
in a place covered with sand or dust, drew
across it a straight line, which they called Skyros, and
at equal distances, on either side, another line. Then
placing the ball on the Skyros, they divided into two
equal parties, and retreated each to their lines, from
which they immediately afterwards rushed forward to
seize the ball. The person who picked it up, then
cast it towards the extreme line of the opposite party,
whose business it was to intercept and throw it back,
and they won who by force or cunning compelled
their opponents to overstep the boundary line.
Daniel Souter[503] contends that this was the English
game of football, into which perhaps it may, in course
of time, have been converted. This rough and, it
must be confessed, somewhat dangerous sport, originally,
in all probability, introduced into this country by
the Romans, may still on Shrove Tuesday be witnessed
in certain towns of South Wales. The balls consist
of bulls’ bladders protected by a thick covering of leather,
and blown tight. Six or eight are made ready
for the occasion, every window in the town is shut by
break of day, at which time all the youths of the
158neighbourhood assemble in the streets. The ball is
then thrown up in front of the town-hall, and the
multitude, dividing into two parts, strive with incredible
eagerness and enthusiasm to overcome their antagonists,
each endeavouring to kick the foot-ball to
the other extremity of the town. In the struggle
severe kicks and wounds are given, and many fierce
battles take place. The ball sometimes mounts thirty
or forty feet above the tops of the highest houses
and falls far beyond, or goes right over into the
gardens, whither it is immediately followed by a
crowd of young men. The sport is kept up all day,
the hungry combatants recruiting their strength from
time to time by copious horns of ale, and an abundant
supply of the nice pancakes which the women sell in
baskets at the corner of every street. To view this
sport, thousands of persons assemble from all the country
round, so that to the secluded population of those
districts it is in some sort what the battle in the
Platanistas was to the Spartans, or even what the
Isthmian and Nemean games were to the whole of
Greece.
The Phæninda[504] is supposed to have received its
name either from its inventor, Phænides (called Phænestios
in Athenæus[505] and the Etymologicon Magnum),
or from the verb Φενακίζειν[506] “to deceive,” because,
making as though they would throw at one person,
they immediately sent it at another, thus deluding the
expectation of the former. It appears at first to have
been played with the small ball called Harpaston,
though the game with the large soft one may afterwards
perhaps have also been called Phæninda. The
variety named Aporraxis consisted in throwing the ball
with some force against the ground and repelling it
constantly as it rebounded; he who did this most frequently,
winning. In the game called Ourania, the
player, bending back his body, flung up the ball with
159all his might into the air; on which there arose a contention
among his companions who should first catch
it in its descent, as Homer appears to intimate in his
description of the Phæacian sport. They likewise
played at ball in the modern fashion against a wall, in
which the person who kept it up longest, won, and
was called king; the one who lost, obtained the name
of ass, and was constrained by the laws of the game
to perform any task set him by the king.[507]
A game generally played in the gymnasia was the
Skaperda. In this a post was set up with a hole near
the top and a rope passed through it. Two young
men then seized each one end of the rope, and turning
their back to the post exerted their utmost strength
to draw their antagonist up the beam. He who raised
his opponent highest won. Sometimes they tried their
strength by binding themselves together, back to back,
and pulling different ways.
The Himanteligmos, “pricking the garter,” in Ireland
“pricking the loop,” was really an ingenious
amusement. It consisted in doubling a thong, and
twisting it into numerous labyrinthine folds, which
done, the other party put the end of a peg into the
midst in search of the point of duplication. If he
missed the mark the thong unwound without entangling
the peg; but if he dropped it into the right
ring his peg was caught and the game won. Hemsterhuis[508]
supposes the Gordian knot to have been
nothing but a variety of the Himanteligmos. He
conjectures that the boys of Abdera were fond of
this game, on which account the sophisms of Democritus
were called ἱμαντελικτεαὶ, and hence probably a
sophist, as one who twists words together, to lash
others, was called Himantelicteus.
Another game, not entirely confined to children,
was the Chalkismos, which consisted in twisting round
rapidly on a board or table a piece of money, and
160placing the point of the finger so dexterously on its
upper edge as to put a stop to its motion without permitting
it to fall. This was a favourite amusement of
Phryne the hetaira, as building houses of cards was of
La Belle Stuart.[509] Some of these sports were peculiar
to the female sex,[510] as the Pentalitha, which is still
played by girls in some remote provinces of our island,
where it is called “Dandies.” The whole apparatus of
the game consisted in five astragals—knuckle bones—pebbles,
or little balls, which, gathered up rapidly,
were thrown into the air and attempted to be caught
in falling on the back of the hand or between the
slightly spread fingers. If any fell it was allowable to
pick them up, provided this were done with the fingers
of the same hand on which the other astragals rested.[511]
The girls of France, according to Bulenger, still amuse
themselves with the Pentalitha, there played with five
little glass balls, which are flung in the air and caught
so dexterously as seldom to fall either on the table or
on the ground. I have never, however, seen it played
myself in that country.
The Astragalismos,[512] which by the Romans was denominated
talorum or taxillorum ludus, (by Hyde
through the Greek πάσσαλος, derived from the Hebræo-Punic
Assila,) by the Arabs Ka’b or Shezn, by the Persians
Shesh-buzhûl bâzi, by the Turks Depshelìm,
(played in their country both by girls and boys,) by
the French Garignon or Osselets, in English “Cockall.”[513]
In the game of astragals the Persians, as is implied
161in the name given above, often use six bones
while the Greeks employed only four, which were
thrown either on a table or on the floor. According
to Lucian,[514] the huckle bones were sometimes those of
the African gazelle.
The several sides of the astragal or huckle bone had
their character expressed by numbers, and obtained
separate names, which determined the value of the
throw.[515] Thus, the side showing the Monas was called
the Dog, the opposite side Chias, and the throw Chios.
In cockall as in dice there are neither twos nor fives.
The highest number, six, was called the Coan (συνορικὸς
or ἑξίτης); the Dog or one was called the Chian or dog-chance;
to which the old proverb alluded Κῶος πρὸς
χῖον, six to one. To have the Dog turn up was to
lose, hence, perhaps, the phrase, “going to the dogs,”
that is, playing a losing game. The throw of eight
was denominated Stesichoros, because the poet’s tomb
at Himera consisted of a perfect octagon. Among
the forty who succeeded to the thirty at Athens
Euripides was one, and hence, if the throw of the
astragals amounted to forty points, they bestowed
upon it the name of Euripides. All animals in which
the astragal is found have it in the hough or pastern of
the hind legs. The τὸ πρανὲς, the gibbous side or blank,
because it counts for nothing; the τὸ κοῖλον, the hollow
side or “put in;” the χῶα, the tortuous side, "cockall,"
or “take all,” so called because it wins the stake; the
smooth side τα χῖα, “take half,” because of the money
put in, it wins half. Among the Greeks and Romans
the put in was called trias, the blank tetras, the half-monas,
and the cockall hexas.[516] By the Arabs they
are denominated the thief, the lamb, the wezeer, and
the sultan; by the Turks the robber, the ploughman,
the kihaya, or the dog, and the bey; by the Persians
162the robber, the rustic, the wezeer, and the schah; by
the Armenians the thief, the ploughman, the steward,
and the lord. The number of casts among the
Greeks, according to Eustathius, amounted to thirty-five.[517]
Pliny[518] speaks of a work of Polycletos representing
naked boys playing at this game, and the reader
will probably remember the mutilated group in the
British Museum, in which a boy having evidently
been beaten at astragals, is biting in revenge the
leg of his conqueror.
To play at Odd or Even[519] was common; so that we
find Plato describing a knot of boys engaged in this
game in a corner of the undressing room of the gymnasium.
There was a kind of divination by astragals,
the bones being hidden under the hand, and the one
party guessing whether they were odd or even. The
same game was occasionally played with beans, walnuts,
or almonds, or even with money, if we may credit
Aristophanes, who describes certain serving-men playing
at Odd or Even with golden staters.[520] There was
a game called Eis Omillan,[521] in which they drew a circle
on the ground, and, standing at a little distance, pitched
the astragals at it; to win consisting in making
them remain within the ring. Another form of the
Eis Omillan was to place a trained quail within a circle,
on a table for example, out of which the point was to
drive it by tapping it with the middle finger. If it
reared at the blow, and retreated beyond the line, its
master lost his wager. The play called Tropa[522] was
also generally performed with astragals, which were
pitched into a small hole, formed to receive such things
when skilfully thrown. The common acorn, and fruit
of the holm oak, were often substituted for astragals
163in this game. The Ephentinda seems to have consisted
in pitching an ostrakon into a circle, so as to
cause it to remain there. The Skeptinda consisted in
placing an ostrakon, or a piece of money, on the
ground, and pitching another at it so as to make it
turn.[523]
164
In Greece, as everywhere else, education[524] commenced
in the nursery; and though time has very much
obscured all remaining traces of the instruction which
the children there received, we are not left on this
point wholly without information. From the very
day of his birth man begins to be acted on by those
causes that furnish his mind with ideas. As his intelligence
acquires strength, the five sluices which let in
all that flood of knowledge which afterwards overflows
his mind, appear to be enlarged, and education
at first, and for some time, consists in watching over
the nature and quality of the ideas conveyed inward
by those channels. It is difficult to say when actual
instruction commenced: but among the earliest formal
attempts at impressing traditionary knowledge on
the infant mind was the repetition by mothers and
nurses of fables and stories, not always, if Plato may
be credited, constructed with a religious or ethical
purpose.[525] They, in fact, introduced into the minds of
their children the legends of the mythology, under the
forms of which truths of the greatest importance, such
as Bacon has developed in his “Wisdom of the Ancients,”
lay sometimes concealed, though more frequently,
perhaps, they inculcated no useful lesson, but
were the mere sportive creations of fancy, or if they
contained any moral kernel the shell in which it was
165cased was too hard for the teeth of the vulgar.
Such, for example, as the legend of Zeus in Hesiod
mutilating his father Kronos, which, in Plato’s opinion,
was not to be delivered to the empty-headed multitude
or to untaught children; but, having sacrificed,
not a hog, but the most precious victim, in mysterious
secrecy to a few.
Wholly different from these, however, were the
fables[526] properly so called, which, invented apparently
by Hesiod,[527] (at least his Hawk and Nightingale is the
oldest example extant in Hellenic literature,) were
afterwards sprinkled by the greatest poets, through
their writings, or spontaneously uttered in pressing
emergencies to warn their countrymen against the
approaches of tyranny. Archilochos’ Eagle and Fox[528]
was famous throughout antiquity, as was likewise
the Horse and the Stag, related by Stesichoros[529] to
the people of Himera, to put them on their guard
against the Machiavellian policy of Gelon. But the
most complete, perhaps, of these ancient compositions
is the fable of the lion, delivered by Eumenes to the
Macedonian generals under his order, when they had
been tampered with by Antigonos, who would have
persuaded them to disband.[530]
“It is said,” observed the Prince, “that once upon
a time a lion falling in love with a young maiden
came to make proposals of marriage to her father.
The old man replied that he was quite ready to
bestow on him his daughter upon one condition,
namely, that he should pluck out his teeth and his
claws, for that he feared his majesty might upon the
wedding night forget himself and unwittingly destroy
the bride. To these terms the lion consented, and
166allowed his teeth and claws to be pulled out, upon
which the father seeing he had lost the only things
which rendered him terrible fell upon him with a club
and beat him to death.” The Æsopic fables[531] which
Socrates a few days before his death amused himself
by turning into verse,[532] are known to us solely by
comparatively modern imitations, and of those which
were denominated Sybaritic we know nothing[533] beyond
the name; for though one scholiast informs
us that the Sybaritic fables brought men upon the
scene, as the Æsopic did animals, another states the
direct contrary. In the earlier and ruder ages of
Greece, however, these compositions were in great
repute, as they are still among the people of the East.
To the infancy of nations as of individuals the wisdom
they contain is, in fact, always palatable; for which
reason they were highly esteemed by Martin Luther
as particularly adapted to the spirit of his times.
Doubtless we know too little of how the foundation
of the republican character was laid in the ancient
commonwealths; but it was laid by woman, and for
centuries cannot have been laid amiss, as the glorious
superstructure of virtue and patriotism erected upon
it fully demonstrates. On this point we must reject
the testimony of Plato’s academic dream. The historic
fields of Marathon, Platæa, Thermopylæ, and a
thousand others confute his fanciful theorising, proving
incontestably that the love of glory and independenceindependence
could, in the very polities which lie least esteemed,
achieve triumphs unknown to the subjects of other
governments.
At seven years[534] old boys were removed from the
harem and sent under the care of a governor to a
public school, which, from the story of Bedreddin
Hassan, we find to have been formerly the practice
among the Arabs, even for the sons of distinguished
167men and Wezeers. “When seven years had passed
over him his grandfather, (Shemseddeen, Wezeer of
the Sultan of Egypt,) committed him to a schoolmaster,
whom he charged to educate him with great
care.”[535]
Mischievous no doubt the boys of Hellas were,
as boys will everywhere be, and many pranks would
they play in spite of the crabbed old slaves set over
them by their parents; on which account, probably,
it is that Plato considers boys, of all wild beasts the
most audacious, plotting, fierce and intractable.[536] But
the urchins now found that it was one thing to nestle
under mamma’s wing at home, and another to delve
under the direction of a didaskalos, and at school-hours,
after the bitter roots of knowledge. For the
school-boys of Greece tasted very little of the sweets
of bed after dawn. “They rose with the light,” says
Lucian, “and with pure water washed away the remains
of sleep, which still lingered on their eyelids.”[537]
Having breakfasted on bread and fruit, to which
through the allurements of their pædagogues they
sometimes added wine,[538] they sallied forth to the didaskaleion,
or schoolmaster’s lair as the comic poets jocularly
termed it,[539] summer and winter, whether the
morning smelt of balm, or was deformed by sleet or
snow, drifting like meal from a sieve down the rocks
of the Acropolis.
Aristophanes has left us a picture, dashed off with
his usual grotesque vigour, of a troop of Attic lads
marching on a winter’s morning to school.[540]
“Now will I sketch the ancient plan of training,
When justice was in vogue and wisdom flourished.
First, modesty restrained the youthful voice
So that no brawl was heard. In order ranged,
The boys from all the neighbourhood appeared,
168Marching to school, naked, though down the sky
Tumbled the flaky snow like flour from sieve.
Arrived, and seated wide apart, the master
First taught them how to chaunt Athena’s praise,
‘Pallas unconquered, stormer of cities!’ or
‘Shout far resounding’ in the self-same notes
Their fathers learned. And if through mere conceit
Some innovation-hunter strained his throat
With scurril lays mincing and quavering,
Like any Siphnian or Chian fop—
As is too much the fashion since that Phrynis
[541]Brought o’er Ionian airs—quickly the scourge
Rained on his shoulders blows like hail as one
Plotting the Muses’ downfal. In the Palæstra
Custom required them decently to sit,
Decent to rise, smoothing the sandy floor
Lest any traces of their form should linger
Unsightly on the dust. When in the bath
Grave was their manner, their behaviour chaste.
At table, too, no stimulating dishes,
Snatched from their elders, such as fish or anis,
Parsley or radishes or thrushes, roused
The slumbering passions.”
[542]
The object of sending boys to school was twofold:
first to cultivate and harmonise their minds by arts
and literature; secondly, so to occupy them that no
time could be allowed for evil thoughts and habits.
On this account, Aristotle enumerating Archytas’
rattle among the principal toys of children, denominates
education the rattle of boys.[543] In order, too,
that its effect might be the more sure and permanent,
no holidays[544], or vacations appear to have been allowed,
while irregularity or lateness of attendance was severely
punished.[545] The theories broached by Montagne,
Locke, and others, that boys are to be kept in
order by reason and persuasion were not anticipated
by the Athenians.[546] They believed that to reduce the
169stubborn will to obedience, and enforce the wholesome
laws of discipline, masters must be armed with
the power of correction, and accordingly their teachers
and gymnasiarchs checked with stripes[547] the slightest
exhibition of stubbornness or indocility.[548]
Nor did their pædagogues[549] or governors behave
towards them with less strictness. These were persons,—slaves
for the most part,—who at Athens as in
the rest of Greece, Sparta not excepted, were from
the earliest ages intrusted with the care of boys, and
whose ministry could on no account be dispensed
with. By Plato[550] even these precautions were deemed
insufficient. In his ideal state he would have the pædagogues
themselves, as at Sparta, under the strictest
inspection, making it the duty of every citizen to have
an eye upon them, and arming him with the power to
correct their delinquencies as well as those of the
boys under their charge. There was to be, moreover,
a general inspector intrusted with authority to punish
neglect, by whichsoever of the parties committed.
Upon these points the views of the Athenians were
unquestionably judicious, for since boys did not
amongst them pass at once from the hands of their
mothers and domestic guardianship into those of the
state as at Sparta, such governors were necessary to
170preserve their manners from defilement and contamination.[551]
Their principal duty consisted in leading the
lad to and from school, in attending him to the
theatre, to the public games, to the forum, and whereverwherever
else it was thought fit he should go.[552] It has been
by some conjectured that while the boys continued
under the care of the schoolmaster the governors remained
in the house, or in a building adjoining denominated
the pædagogeion, to await their return; but
the inference, drawn chiefly from the name of the edifice,
is erroneous; pædagogeion was employed to signify
the school itself,[553] and we have the testimony of Plato
to prove that the pædagogue having delivered the boy
to the didaskalos, usually returned to his master’s
house.
On the character of these governors[554] antiquity appears
to have transmitted us more satire than information.
If we may credit some writers, it was not
merely slaves who were intrusted with the care of
boys, but often the meanest and vilest of slaves,—base
in mind, depraved in manners,—whose guardianship,
when they chanced to be crabbed and morose, could
be no other than disgusting to their charges; and,
when inclined to indulgence, most pernicious. Nay,
were they themselves corrupt, what could be of more
evil tendency than their own example? They who
take this view of the matter appear to me illogical
and inconsistent.[555] Though aware that these men
were chosen by the parents to preserve their children
from bad example, from the infection of corrupt
manners, from the allurements of vicious companions,
these writers persuade themselves that they voluntarily
171gave them as companions and guardians men
worse than whom could not be found. It is more
reasonable to conclude that when these pædagogues
proved unworthy of the trust reposed in them they
were sufficient masters of hypocrisy to conceal their
vices at home, and only revealed themselves to their
young masters gradually as their lessons produced
their evil fruits. Thus, it is clear, that the father
whom the comic writer Plato, in his Fellow Deceiver,[556]
introduced reproaching the pædagogue who had corrupted
his son, knew nothing of his evil ways when
he delivered the lad to his keeping.
“The youth, O wretch, whom I intrusted to thee
Thou hast perverted, teaching him vile habits
Once stranger to his mind; for now he drinks
Even in the morning, which was not his wont.”
With the greatest reason we may suppose, that
of all the domestics in the family the most staid and
sober, the most attached, the most faithful, were
chosen to fulfil this important duty, such as Plautus
describes an honest pædagogue,—
Eademque erat hæc disciplina olim, cum tu adolescens eras?
Nego tibi hoc annis viginti fuisse primis copiæ,
Digitum longe a pædagogo pedem ut efferres ædibus,
Ante solem exorientem nisi in palæstram veneras,
Gymnasii præfecto haud mediocres pœnas penderes.
Idque ubi obtigerat, hoc etiam ad malum arcessabatur malum
Et discipulus et magister perhibebantur improbi.
Ubi cursu, luctando, hasta, disco, pugillatu, pila,
Saliendo sese exercebant magis, quam, scorto aut saviis:
Ibi suam ætatem extendebant, non in latebrosis locis.
Inde de hippodromo et palæstra ubi revenisses domum,
Cincticulo præcinctus in sella apud magistrum assideres:
Cum librum legeres. Si unam peccavisses syllabam,
Fieret corium tam maculosum quam est nutricis pallium
* * * * * Id equidem ego certo scio.
Nam olim populi prius honorem capiebat suffragio,
Quam magistri desinebat esse dicto obediens.[557]
Lucian, too, speaking of the attendants of youths
in the better times of the republic, describes them
172as an honourable company who followed their young
masters to the schools, not with combs and looking-glasses
like the attendants of ladies, but with the
venerable instruments of wisdom in their hands,
many-leaved tablets or books recording the glorious
deeds of their ancestors, or if proceeding to the
music master bearing, instead of these, the melodious
lyre.[558]
In fact the fortunes of war often in those days
reduced men of virtue and ability to the condition of
slaves, when they would naturally be chosen as the
governors of youth. Thus we find Diogenes the Cynic
purchased by a rich Corinthian, who intrusted to him
the education of his sons. The account which antiquity
has left us of his sale, reception by his master,
and manner of teaching, being extremely brief, we shall
here give it entire. Hermippos[559] who wrote a small
treatise called the Sale of Diogenes, observes that
when the philosopher was exposed in the slave-market
and interrogated respecting his qualifications, he replied
that “He could command men;” and then addressing
himself to the herald, bade him inquire
whether there was any one present who wanted a
master. Being forbidden to sit down, he said “This
matters nothing, for fish are bought in whatever way
they may lie.” He remarked also, that he wondered
that when people were buying a pot or a dish
they examined it on all sides, whereas when they
purchased a man they were contented with simply
looking at him. Afterwards, when he had become
the slave of Xeniades, he informed his owner that he
expected the same obedience to be paid to him as
men yield to a pilot or a physician.
It is further related by Eubulos, who likewise wrote
a treatise on this incident, that Diogenes conducted
with the utmost care the education of the children
under his charge. In addition to the ordinary studies,
173he taught them to ride, to draw the bow, to use the
sling, and to throw the javelin. In the palæstra,
moreover, where, contrary to the Athenian practice
he remained to watch over the boys, Diogenes would
not permit the master of the Gymnasium to exercise
them after the manner of the athletæ; but in those
parts only of gymnastics, which had a tendency to
animate them and strengthen their constitutions.
They learned also by heart,[560] under his direction, numerous
sentences from the poets and historians, as well
as from his own writings. It was his practice likewise
very greatly to abridge his explanations in order that
they might the more easily be committed to memory.
At home he habituated them to wait on themselves,
to be content with frugal fare, and drink water, from
which it may be inferred that others drank wine. He
accustomed them to cut their hair close, not to be
fastidious in dress, and to walk abroad with him barefoot
and without a chiton, silent and with downcast
eyes.[561] He also went out with them to hunt. On
their part they took great care of him, and pleaded
his cause with their parents. He therefore grew old
in the family, and they performed for him the rites of
sepulture.
Now what Diogenes was in the house of Xeniades
numerous pædagogues were doubtless found to be in
other parts of Greece. But the majority it is thought
were open to blame; and so they are everywhere,
and so they would be, though taken from the best
classes of mankind. That is, they were men with
174many failings, far from what could be wished; but
that their character upon the whole was respectable
seems to me demonstrated by the powers delegated
to them by the parents. For not only could they
use upon occasion, as we have said, menace and harsh
language,—they were even permitted to have recourse
to blows, in order to preserve their pupils from vices
which none would have sooner taught than they, had
their characters been such as is commonly believed.
For example, would they have made a drunkard the
guardian of a boy’s sobriety? a thief the guardian of
his honesty? a libertine of his chastity? a coarse and
ribald jester the inculcator of modesty and purity of
language?[562]
At home, of course, the influence and example of
the parents surpassed all other influences, of the
mother more especially, who up to their manhood
retained over her sons the greatest authority. Of
this a playful illustration occurs in the Lysis of
Plato.[563] Socrates, interrogating the youth respecting
the course of his studies, inquires archly whether
when in the harem he was not as a matter of course
permitted to play with his mother’s wool basket, and
loom, and spathe, and shuttle?
“If I touched them,” replied Lysis, laughing, “I
should soon feel the weight of the shuttle upon my
fingers.”
“But,” proceeds the philosopher, “if your mother
or father require anything to be read or written for
them, they, probably, prefer your services to those
of any other person?”
“No doubt.”
“And in this case, as you have been instructed in
reading and spelling, they allow you to proceed
according to your own knowledge. So likewise,
when you play to them on the lyre, they suffer
175you, as you please, to relax or tighten the chords,
to touch them with the fingers, or strike them
with the plectron,—do they not?”
“Certainly.”
From this it would appear that the authority of the
parents was equal; though generally at Athens, as
Plato[564] elsewhere complains, greater reverence was paid
to the commands of the mother even than to those of
the father. Indeed to be wanting in respect to her
was there deemed the ne plus ultra of depravity.[565] The
father, however, of necessity took a considerable share
in the instruction and moral training of his son,[566] who
at home profited by his conversation, and, arrived at
the proper age, accompanied him abroad.[567] When reduced
to the state of orphanhood the republic took
children under its own protection, not considering it
safe to intrust them to the sole guidance of masters or
pædagogues.
Care, too, was taken lest those public schools, established
for the advancement of virtue and morals, should
themselves be converted into nurseries of vice. They
were by law[568] forbidden to be opened before sunrise, and
were closed at sunset; nor during the day could any
other men be introduced besides the teachers,[569] though
it appears from some of Plato’s dialogues that this
enactment was not very strictly observed.[570] To prevent
habits of brawling, boys were forbidden to assemble in
crowds in the streets on their way to school. Nor
were these laws deemed sufficient; but still further to
176protect their morals ten annual magistrates called Sophronistæ,
one from each tribe, were elected by show of
hands,[571] whose sole business it was to watch over the
manners of youth. This magistracy, dated as far back
as the age of Solon,[572] and continued in force to the
latest time.time. The Gymnasiarch, another magistrate,[573]
was intrusted with the superintendence of the Gymnasia,
which, like the public games and festivals,
appeared to require peculiar care; and, if we can receive
the testimony of Plautus[574] for the classical ages
of the commonwealth, transgressors received severe
chastisement.
It has sometimes been imagined that in Greece separate
edifices were not erected as with us expressly
for school-houses, but that both the didaskalos and the
philosopher taught their pupils in fields, gardens or
shady groves.[575] But this was not the common practice,
though many schoolmasters appear to have had no
other place wherein to assemble their pupils than the
portico of a temple[576] or some sheltered corner in the
street, where in spite of the din of business and the
throng of passengers the worship of learning was publicly
performed. Here, too, the music-masters frequently
gave their lessons, whether in singing or on
the lyre, which practice explains the anecdote of the
musician, who, hearing the crowd applaud one of his
scholars, gave him a box on the ear, observing, “Had
you played well these blockheads would not have
praised you.” A custom very similar prevails in the
177East, where, in recesses open to the street, we often
see the turbaned schoolmaster with a crowd of
little Moslems about him, tracing letters on their
large wooden tablets or engaged in recitations of the
Koran.
But these were the schools of the humbler classes.
For the children of the noble and the opulent spacious
structures were raised, and furnished with tables,
desks,—for that peculiar species of grammateion[577]
which resembled the plate cupboard, can have been
nothing but a desk,—forms, and whatsoever else their
studies required. Mention is made of a school at
Chios[578] which contained one hundred and twenty boys,
all of whom save one were killed by the falling in of
the roof. From another tragical story we learn that
in Astypalæa,[579] one of the Cyclades, there was a school
which contained sixty boys. The incidents connected
with their death are narrated in the romantic style of
the ancients. Cleomedes, a native of this island,
having in boxing slain Iccos the Epidaurian, was
accused of unfairness and refused the prize, upon which
he became mad and returned to his own country.
There, entering into the public school, he approached
the pillar that supported the roof, and like another
Sampson seized it in an access of frenzy, and wresting
it from its basis brought down the whole building
upon the children. He himself however escaped, but,
being pursued with stones by the inhabitants, took
sanctuary in the temple of Athena, where he concealed
himself in the sacred chest. The people paying
no respect to the holy place still pursued him and
attempted to force open the lid, which he held down
with gigantic strength. At length when the coffer
was broken in pieces Cleomedes was nowhere to be
found, dead or alive. Terrified at this prodigy they
sent to consult the oracle of Delphi, by which they
178were commanded to pay divine honours to the athlete
as the last of the heroes.[580]
In the interior of the school there was commonly
an oratory[581] adorned with statues of the Muses, where,
probably in a kind of font, was kept a supply of pure
water for the boys. Pretending often, when they
were not, to be thirsty, they would steal in knots to
this oratory, and there amuse themselves by splashing
the water over each other; on which account the
legislator ordained that strict watch should be kept
over it. Every morning the forms were spunged,[582]
the schoolroom was cleanly swept, the ink ground
ready for use, and all things were put in order for
the business of the day.
The apparatus[583] of an ancient school was somewhat
complicated: there were mathematical instruments,
globes, maps, and charts of the heavens, together with
boards whereon to trace geometrical figures, tablets,
large and small, of box-wood, fir, or ivory[584] triangular
in form, some folding with two, and others with
many leaves; books too and paper, skins of parchment,
wax for covering the tablets, which, if we may
believe Aristophanes,[585] people sometimes ate when
they were hungry.[586]
To the above were added rulers, reed-pens,[587] pen-cases,
179pen-knives, pencils, and last, though not least,
the rod which kept them to the steady use of all
these things.
At Athens these schools were not provided by the
state. They were private speculations, and each
master was regulated in his charges by the reputation
he had acquired and the fortunes of his pupils. Some
appear to have been extremely moderate in their
demands.[588]
There was for example a school-master named Hippomachos,
upon entering whose establishment boys
were required to pay down a mina, after which they
might remain as long and benefit by his instructions
as much as they pleased. Didaskaloi were not however
held in sufficient respect, though as their scholars
were sometimes very numerous,[589] as many for example
as a hundred and twenty, it must often have happened
that they became wealthy. From the life of Homer,
attributed to Herodotus,[590] we glean some few particulars
respecting the condition of a schoolmaster in remoter
ages.
Phemios it is there related kept a school at Smyrna,
where he taught boys their letters and all those other
parts of education then comprehended under the term
music. His slave Chritheis, the mother of the poet,
spun and wove the wool which Phemios received in
payment from his scholars. She likewise introduced
into his house great elegance and frugality, which so
pleased the school-master that it induced him to marry
180her. Under this man, according to the tradition received
in Greece, Homer studied, and made so great a
proficiency in knowledge that he was soon enabled to
commence instructor himself. He therefore proceeded
to Chios,[591] and opened a school where he initiated
the youth in the beauties of epic poetry, and, performing
his duties with great wisdom, obtained many admirers
among the Chians, became wealthy, and took
a wife, by whom he had two sons.
The earliest task to be performed at school was
to gain a knowledge of the Greek characters, large
and small, to spell next, next to read. Herodes the
Sophist experienced much vexation from the stupidity
exhibited in achieving this enterprise by his son Atticus,
whose memory was so sluggish that he could not
even recollect the Christ-cross-row. To overcome this
extraordinary dulness he educated along with him
twenty-four little slaves of his own age, upon whom
he bestowed the names of the letters, so that young
Atticus might be compelled to learn his alphabet as
he played with his companions, now calling out for
Omicron now for Psi.[592] In teaching the art of writing
their practice nearly resembled our own; the master
traced with what we must call a pencil (γραφὶς), a
number of characters on a tablet, and the pupil following
with the pen the guidance of the faint lines[593]
before him, accustomed his fingers to perform the requisite
movements with adroitness.[594] These things
181were necessarily the first step in the first class of
studies, which were denominated music,[595] and comprehended
everything connected with the developement
of the mind; and they were carried to a certain extent
before the second division called gymnastics was commenced.
They reversed the plan commonly adopted
among ourselves, for with them poetry[596] preceded
prose, a practice which coöperating with their susceptible
temperament, impressed upon the national mind
that imaginative character for which it was preëminently
distinguished. And the poets in whose works
they were first initiated were of all the most poetical,
the authors of lyrical and dithyrambic pieces,
selections from whose verses they committed to memory,
thus acquiring early a rich store of sentences
and imagery ready to be adduced in argument or
illustration, to furnish familiar allusions or to be
woven into the texture of their style.[597]
Considerable difference however existed in the practice
of different teachers. Some imagining that by
the variety of their acquirements they would be rendered
eloquent, recommended the indiscriminate study
of the poets,[598] whether they wrote in hexameter, in trimeter,
or any other kind of verse, on ludicrous or on
serious subjects. Certain poets there were who like
Fenelon and the pretended Ossian, wrote their works
in prose,[599] respecting the use of whose compositions
Plato was in some doubt.
By other philosophers wandering unrestrained over
the vast fields of literature was condemned. They
desired to separate the gold from the dross, contending
182that persons accustomed from their infancy to the
loftier and purer inspirations of the muse will regard
with contempt every thing mean or illiberal, whereas
they who have learned to delight in low and vulgar
compositions will consider all other literature tame
and insipid. For so great is the force of imitation,
that habits commenced from the earliest years pass
into the manners and character of a man, affecting
even his voice and corporeal developement, nay, modifying
the very nature of the thoughts themselves.
Among the other branches of knowledge[600] most
necessary to be studied, and to which they applied
themselves nearly from the outset, was arithmetic,
without some inkling of which, a man, in Plato’s
opinion, could scarcely be a citizen at all. For, as
he observes, there is no art or science which does not
stand in some need of it, especially the art of war,
where many combinations depend entirely on numbers.
And yet Agamemnon in some of the old tragic
poets was represented by Palamedes as wholly ignorant
of calculation, so that possibly, as Socrates jocularly
observes, he could not reckon his own feet.[601] The importance
attached to this branch of education, nowhere
more apparent than in the dialogues of Plato, furnishes
183one proof that the Athenians were preëminently men
of business, who in all their admiration for the good
and beautiful never lost sight of those things which
promote the comfort of life, and enable a man effectually
to perform his ordinary duties. With the same
views were geometry and astronomy pursued. For, in
the Republic, Glaucon,[602] who may be supposed to represent
the popular opinion, confesses at once, upon the
mention of geometry, that as it is applicable to the
business of war it would be most useful. He could
discover the superiority of the geometrician[603] over the
ignorant man in pitching a camp, in the taking of
places, in contracting or expanding the ranks of an
army, and all those other military movements practised
in battles, marches or sieges. To Plato however
this was its least recommendation. He conceived that
in the search after goodness and truth the study of
this science was especially beneficial to the mind, both
because it deals in positive verities, and thus begets
a love of them, and likewise superinduces the habit of
seeking them through lengthened investigation and of
being satisfied with nothing less.
In the study of astronomy[604] itself a coarse and
obvious utility was almost of necessity the first thing
aimed at, and even in the age of Socrates, when philosophical
wants were keenly felt in addition to those
of the animal and civil life, there were evidently
teachers who considered it necessary to justify such
pursuits, by showing their bearing on the system of
loss and profit. For when Socrates comes in his ideal
scheme of education to touch on this science, Glaucon,
the practical man, at once recognises its usefulness,
not only in husbandry and navigation, but in affairs
military. Nor are such fruits of it to be despised.
184But philosophy proposes a higher aim, insisting, in
opposition to popular belief, that by means of such
pursuits the soul may be purified, and its powers of
discovering truth, overlaid and nearly extinguished by
other studies, rekindled and fanned into activity like
a flame.
The importance of music,[605] in the education of the
Greeks, is generally understood. It was employed to
effect several purposes. First, to soothe and mollify
the fierceness of the national character, and prepare
the way for the lessons of the poets, which, delivered
amid the sounding of melodious strings, when the soul
was rapt and elevated by harmony, by the excitement
of numbers, by the magic of the sweetest associations,
took a firm hold upon the mind, and generally
retained it during life. Secondly, it enabled the
citizens gracefully to perform their part in the amusements
of social life, every person being in his turn
called upon at entertainments to sing or play upon
the lyre. Thirdly, it was necessary to enable them to
join in the sacred choruses, rendered frequent by
the piety of the state, and for the due performance in
old age of many offices of religion, the sacerdotal character
belonging more or less to all the citizens of
Athens. Fourthly, as much of the learning of a
Greek was martial and designed to fit him for defending
his country, he required some knowledge
of music that on the field of battle his voice might
harmoniously mingle with those of his countrymen,
in chaunting those stirring, impetuous, and terrible
melodies, called pæans, which preceded the first
shock of fight.
For some, or all of these reasons, the science of
music began to be cultivated among the Hellenes,
at a period almost beyond the reach even of tradition.
185The Bards, whom we behold wandering on the remotest
edge of the fabulous horizon, have invariably
harps or lyres in their hands; and the greatest of the
heroes of poetry, the very acme of Epic excellence, is
represented delighting in the performance of music,
and chaunting on the shores of the Hellespont the
deeds of former warriors. In those ages the music
of the whole nation possessed evidently a grave and
lofty character; but as that of the Ionians became
afterwards modified by the influence of a softer climate
and imitation of the Asiatic, while the Dorian
measure remained nearly unchanged, the latter is supposed
to have possessed originally the superiority over
the former, which in reality it did not. In process of
time, however, the existence of three distinct measures
was recognised, the Dorian, the Æolian, and
the Ionian: the first was grave, masculine, full of
energy, and though somewhat monotonous peculiarly
adapted to inspire martial ardour; the last distinguished
by a totally different character, rich, varied,
flexible, breathing softness and pleasure, adorning the
hour of peace and murmuring plaintively through
the groves and temples of Aphrodite, Apollo, and
the Muses; while the second, which was fiery, with
a mixture of gaiety, formed the intermediate step
between the two measures, partaking something of
the character of each. The Hypermixolydian and
Hyperphrygian, at one time cultivated among the
Ionians, were comparatively recent inventions.[606]
The Phrygian measure distinguished for its exciting
and enthusiastic character,[607] was much employed
upon the stage, on which account Agias the
poet used to say that the styrax burned on the altar
in the orchestra had a Phrygian smell, because its
odours recalled the wild Phrygian measures there
heard. The national instrument of the Phrygians
was the flute, and it is worthy of remark that up
186to a very late period flute-players at Athens were
usually distinguished by Phrygian names. Olympos
the greatest musician known to the Greeks, was probably
himself a native of Phrygia, since he is said to
have been a pupil of Marsyas. In fact the barbarians
of antiquity appear, though in a somewhat different
way, to have made as much use of music as the
Greeks themselves. They chaunted the songs of
their bards in going to battle, sang funeral dirges
at tombs, and even caused their ambassadors when
proceeding on a mission to foreign states to be accompanied
by music.[608] No people, however, appear
to have carried their love for music to so preposterous
a length as the Tyrrhenians, who caused their
slaves to be flogged to the sound of the flute.
The music of the flute[609] was supposed to be peculiarly
delightful to the gods, so that those who died
while its sounds were on their ears were permitted
to taste of the gifts of Aphrodite in Hades, as Philetæros
expresses it in his Flute-lover:
“O Zeus! how glorious ’tis to die while piercing flutes are near
Pouring their stirring melodies into the faltering ear;
On these alone doth Eros smile within those realms of night,
Where vulgar ghosts in shivering bands, all strangers to delight,
In leaky tub from Styx’s flood the icy waters bear,
Condemned, for woman’s lovely voice, its moaning sounds to
hear.”hear.”
The teachers of music were divided into two
classes: the Citharistæ, who simply played on the
instrument, and the Citharœdi who accompanied
themselves on the cithara with a song.[610] Of these
the humble and poorer taught, as we have already
observed, in the corners of the streets, while the
abler and more fortunate opened schools of music
or gave their lessons in the private dwellings of the
great. The Cithara, however, was not anciently in
187use at Athens, if we may credit the tradition which
attributes to Phrynis its introduction from Ionia.[611]
Damon the great Athenian musician[612] used to observe,
that wherever the mind is susceptible of powerful
emotions there will be the song and the dance,
and that wherever men are free and honourable their
amusements will be liberal and decorous, where men
are otherwise the contrary. A very judicious remark
was likewise made by Caphesias the flute-player.
Observing one of his pupils striving to produce loud
sounds, he stamped on the ground and said,—"Boy,
that is not always good which is great; but that is
great which is good."[613]
The power of music in assuaging passion and anger
is well illustrated by an anecdote of Cleinias the Pythagorean
philosopher, a man distinguished for his
virtue and gentleness. If at any time he felt himself
moved to wrath, taking up his lyre he would touch
the chords and chaunt thereto some ode, and if any
questioned why he did so, he would reply, “I am in
search of serenity.”[614]
Like the Hebrews, also, the people of Hellas attributed
to music still more marvellous virtues,[615] conceiving
it to be able to cure diseases both of the mind
and body. Thus the sounds of the flute were supposed
to remove epilepsy, and sciatica, and faintness,
and fear, and paroxysms of long-established madness,[616]
which will probably remind the reader of David
playing before Saul, when his mind was troubled.
In the later ages of the commonwealth drawing
likewise, and the elements of art entered into the
188list of studies pursued by youths, partly with the view
of diffusing a correct taste, and the ability to appreciate
and enjoy the noble productions of the pencil
and chisel, and partly, perhaps, from the mere love
of novelty, and the desire which man always feels
to enlarge the circle of his acquirements. Aristotle,[617]
indeed, suggests a much humbler motive, observing
that a knowledge of drawing would enable men to
appreciate more accurately the productions of the
useful arts; but this perhaps was said more in deference
to that spirit of utilitarianism then beginning
to show itself than from any conviction of
its soundness.
189
Simultaneously with the above studies,[618] that highly
intricate and artificial system of exercises denominated
gymnastics occupied a considerable portion
of the time of youth. Among northern nations the
influence of education is requisite to soften the manners
and check ferocity; but in the south hardihood
must in general be the fruit of discipline, and flourishes
only while assiduously cultivated. Thus we find
that the Persians,[619] by acting on the advice of Crœsos,
and teaching the Lydians to become musicians and
shopkeepers, uprooted entirely their martial spirit.
In Greece, however, during the flourishing period of
her history there was more danger that the passion
for war should drown all others, than that its influence
should be too feeble. Among the Athenians particularly,
that restless energy of character, so marvellous
and so distasteful to the Dorians, sought vent in dangerous
and distant wars and stupendous schemes of
ambition. This characteristic trait is adduced by
Plato for the purpose of suggesting a contrast with
the rival race. He had been dwelling, to his Cretan
and Spartan companions, on the exercises necessary
for pregnant women,[620] and observing their astonishment,
he could understand, he said, how it might
appear extraordinary to them, but at Athens his
recommendation would be perfectly intelligible; for
there, people were rather too active than otherwise.
The difficulty always was to find becoming employment.
190Accordingly, for lack of something better,
not merely boys but grown-up men, comprehending
nothing of the dolce far niente, employed themselves
in breeding cocks, quails, and other birds for fighting,
and the care of these imposed on them the necessity
of much exercise. To be sure, these cock-fighters,
during their professional perambulations, presented a
spectacle infinitely ludicrous. All regard to appearances
was abandoned. With a couple of small cocks[621]
in their hands, and an old one under either arm, they
sallied forth, like vagabonds who had been robbing
a henroost, to give their favourite animals air and
gentle exercise, and thus laden often strolled several
miles into the country.
To such a people the gymnasium opened up a
source of peculiar delight, and in the end became
a passion prejudicial to the cultivation of the understanding.
But within the bounds of moderation it
was prescribed by philosophers in lieu of physic,
and as an antidote against those pale faces and emaciated
frames, too common where intellectual studies
are ardently pursued.[622] It was a law of Solon, that
every Athenian[623] should be able to read and to swim;
191and the whole spirit of Attic legislation, leaving the
poor to the exercise of industrious and hardy occupations,
tended to create among the opulent and the
noble a taste for field-sports, horsemanship, and every
martial and manly exercise.[624] The difficulty, of course,
was to render them subordinate to mental cultivation,
and to blend both so cunningly together as
to produce a beautiful and harmonious system of
discipline, well fitted to ripen and bring to greatest
perfection every power and faculty of body and
mind.
The practises of the gymnasium may be traced
backward to the remotest antiquity, and probably
commenced among the warriors of the heroic ages,[625]
in the peaceful intervals occurring between expeditions,
from the desire to amuse their leisure by mimic
representations of more serious contests. At first, no
doubt, the exercises, frequently performed in honour
of the gods,[626] were few and rude; but by the age of
Homer they had assumed an artificial and regular
form, and comprehended nearly all such divisions
of the art as prevailed in later times. Other views
than those with which they were instituted, caused
them to be kept up. When reflection awoke, it was
perceived that in these amicable contests men acquired
not only force and agility, a martial bearing,
the confidence of strength, beauty, and lightness of
form; but, along with them, that easy cheerfulness
into which robust health naturally blossoms.[627] In fact,
so far were the legislators of Greece from designing
by gymnastics to create, as Montesquieu[628] supposes,
a nation of mere athletes and combatants, that they
expressly repudiate the idea, affirming that lightness,
agility, a compactly knit frame, health, but chiefly
a well-poised and vigorous mind, were the object of
this part of education. In order the better to attain
192this point, Plato in his republic ordains that boys
be completed in their intellectual studies, which in
his ideal state they were to be at the age of sixteen,
before they entered the gymnasium, the exercises
of which were to be the companions of simple music.
From converting their citizens into athletes they
were prevented by experience; for it was quickly
discovered that those men who made a profession of
gymnastics acquired, indeed, by their diet and peculiar
discipline a huge stature and enormous strength,
but were altogether useless in war, being sleepy, lethargic,
prodigious eaters, incapable of enduring thirst
or hunger, and liable to the attacks of sudden and
fatal diseases if they departed in the least degree
from their usual habits and regimen.[629]
Already in the Homeric age, gymnastics, though
not as yet so named, constituted the principal object
of education, and many branches of the art had even
then been carried to a high degree of perfection.[630]
The passion for it descended unimpaired to the
Spartans, whose polity, framed solely for the preservation
of national independence and the acquisition
of glory in war, inspired little fondness for
mental pursuits, but left the youth chiefly to the
influence of the gymnasia, which gradually created
in them a temper of mind compounded of insensibility
and ferocity,[631] not unlike that of the North
American Indians. This, however, they above all
things prized, though as has been justly observed
their exercises could in no sense be considered among
the aids to intellectual cultivation.[632]
At Athens they came later into vogue, though
common in the age of Solon. When, however, this
193ardent and enthusiastic people commenced the study
of gymnastics, admiring as they did strength and
vigour of frame, when united with manly beauty,
their plastic genius soon converted it into an art
worthy to be enumerated among the studies of youth.
In very early ages they imitated the Spartan custom
of admitting even boys into the gymnasia. But this
was soon abandoned, it being found more profitable
first to instruct them in several of the branches of
study above described, and a class of men[633] called
pædotribæ or gymnasts arose, who taught the gymnastic
art privately, in subordination to their other studies,
and were regarded as indispensable in the progress
of education.[634] These masters gave their instructions
in the palæstræ,[635] which generally formed
a part of the gymnasia, though not always joined with
those edifices, and to be carefully distinguished from
them. It is not known with certainty at what age
boys commenced their gymnastic exercises, though it
appears probable that it was not until their grammatical
and musical studies were completed, that is somewhere
perhaps, as Plato counsels, about the age of sixteen.
For it was not judged advisable to engage
them in too many studies at once, since in bodies
not yet endowed with all their strength over-exertion
was considered injurious.
Before we enumerate and explain the several exercises
it may be proper to introduce a description of
the gymnasia themselves. Of these establishments
there were many at Athens;[636] though three only, those
of the Academy, Lyceum, and Cynosarges have acquired
celebrity. The site of the first of these gymnasia
being low and marshy was in ancient times
infested with malaria, but having been drained by
Cimon and planted with trees it became a favourite
194promenade and place of exercise.[637] Here, in walks
shaded by the sacred olive, might be seen young men,[638]
with crowns of rushes in flower upon their heads,
enjoying the sweet odour of the smilax and the
white poplar, while the platanos and the elm mingled
their murmurs in the breeze of spring. The meadows
of the Academy, according to Aristophanes the grammarian,
were planted with the Apragmosune,[639] a sort
of flower so called as though it smelt of all kind of
fragrance and safety like our Heart’s-ease or flower of
the Trinity. This place is supposed to have derived
its name from Ecadamos, a public-spirited man who
bequeathed his property for the purpose of keeping
it in order. Around it were groves of the moriæ
sacred to Athena, whence the olive crowns used in
the Panathenaia were taken. The reason why the
olive trees as well as those in the Acropolis were
denominated moriæ must be sought for among the
legends of the mythology, where it is related that Halirrothios
son of Poseidon formed the design of felling
them because the patronship of the city had been
adjudged to Athena, for the discovery of this tree.
Raising his axe, however, and aiming a blow at the
trunk the implement glanced, and he thus inflicted
upon himself a wound whereof he died.[640]
The name of the Lyceum[641] sometimes derived from
Lycus, son of Pandion[642] probably owed its origin to
the temenos of Lycian Apollo there situated. It
lay near the banks of the Ilissos, and was adorned
with stately edifices, fountains and groves. Here
stood a celebrated statue of Apollo, in a graceful
attitude, as if reposing after toil, with his bow in the
left hand, and the right bent negligently over his
195head. The walls, too, were decorated with paintings.
In this place anciently the Polemarch held his court[643]
and the forces of the republic were exercised before
they went forth to war.[644]
Appended to the name of the Cynosarges, or third
gymnasium surrounded with groves[645] was a legend
which related that when Diomos was sacrificing to
Hestia, a white dog snatched away a part of the
victim from the altar, and running straightway out
of the city deposited it on the spot where this gymnasium
was afterwards erected.[646] Here were several
magnificent and celebrated temples to Alcmena,
to Hebe, to Heracles, and to his companion Iolaos.
Its principal patron, however, was Heracles,[647] who,
lying himself under the suspicion of illegitimacy, came
very naturally to be regarded as the protector of
bastards, half citizens, and in general all persons of
spurious birth, who accordingly in remoter ages resorted
thither to perform their exercises.
Themistocles afterwards, by prevailing upon several
of the young nobility to accompany him to the Cynosarges,
obliterated its reproach, and placed it on the
same level with the other gymnasia.[648] Here anciently
stood a court in which causes respecting illegitimacy,
false registry, &c. were tried. But to proceed to the
general description. “The gymnasia were spacious
edifices, surrounded by gardens and a sacred grove.
The first entrance was by a square court, two stadia
in circumference, encompassed with porticoes and
buildings. On three of its sides were large halls, provided
with seats, in which philosophers, rhetoricians,
and sophists assembled their disciples. On the fourth
were rooms for bathing and other practices of the
196gymnasium. The portico facing the south was double,
to prevent the winter rains, driven by the wind, from
penetrating into the interior. From this court you
passed into an enclosure, likewise square, shaded in
the middle by plane-trees. A range of colonnades
extended round three of the sides. That which fronted
the north had a double row of columns, to shelter
those who walked there in summer from the sun.
The opposite piazza was called Xystos, in the middle
of which, and through its whole length, they contrived
a sort of pathway, about twelve feet wide and nearly
two deep, where, sheltered from the weather, and
separated from the spectators ranged along the sides,
the young scholars exercised themselves in wrestling.
Beyond the Xystos was a stadium for foot-races.”[649]
The principal parts of the gymnasium were,—first,
the porticoes, furnished with seats and side-buildings
where the youths met to converse. 2. The Ephebeion,[650]
that part of the edifice where the youth alone
exercised. 3. The Apodyterion, or undressing-room.[651]
4. The Konisterion, or small court in which was kept
the haphe, or yellow kind of sand sprinkled by the
wrestlers over their bodies[652] after being anointed with
the ceroma, or oil tempered with wax. An important
part of the baggage of Alexander in his Indian expedition
consisted of this fine sand for the gymnasium.
5. The Palæstra, when considered as part of the gymnasium,[653]
was simply the place set apart for wrestling:
the whole of its area was covered with a deep stratum
of mud. 6. The Sphæristerion,[654]—that part of the gymnasium
in which they played at ball. 7. Aleipterion
or Elaiothesion,[655] that part of the palæstra where the
197wrestlers anointed themselves with oil. 8. The area:
the great court, and certain spaces in the porticoes,
were used for running, leaping, or pitching the quoit.
9. The Xystoi have been described above. 10. The
Xysta[656] were open walks in which, during fine weather,
the youths exercised themselves in running or any
other suitable recreation. 11. The Balaneia or baths,
where in numerous basins was water of various degrees
of temperature, in which the young men bathed
before anointing themselves, or after their exercises.
12. Behind the Xystos, and running parallel with
it, lay the stadium,[657] which, as its name implies, was
usually the eighth part of a mile in length. It resembled
the section of a cylinder, rounded at the ends.
From the area below, where the runners performed
their exercises, the sides, whether of green turf or
marble, sloped upwards to a considerable height, and
were covered with seats, rising behind each other to
the top for the accommodation of spectators.
Such were the buildings which Athens appropriated
to the exercises of its youth; and if we consider the
conveniences which they contained, the large spaces
they enclosed, and the taste and magnificence which
they exhibited, we shall probably conclude that no
country in the world ever bestowed on the physical
training of its citizens so much enlightened care.
The first step in gymnastics was to accustom the
youth to endure, naked, the fiercest rays of the sun
and the cold of winter, to which they were exposed
during their initiatory exercises.[658] This is illustrated
in a very lively manner by Lucian, where he introduces
the Scythian Anacharsis anxious to escape from
the scorching rays of noon to the shade of the plane-trees;
while Solon, who had been educated according
198to the Hellenic system, stands without inconvenience
bareheaded in the sun. The step next in order was
wrestling, always regarded as the principal among
gymnastic contests, both from its superior utility and
the great art and skill which the proper practice of it
required. To the acquisition of excellence in this
exercise the palæstra and the instructions of the pædotribæ
were almost entirely devoted; while nearly every
other branch of gymnastics was performed in the gymnasium.
These, according to Lucian, were divided
into two classes, one of which required for their performance
a soft or muddy area, the other one of sand,
or an arena properly so called.[659] In all these exercises
the youth were naked, and had their bodies anointed
with oil.
To render, however our account of the exercises
more complete, it may be proper to give a separate
though brief description of each. The first or most
simple was the Dromos or Course,[660] performed, as has
been above observed, in the area of the stadium, which,
in order to present the greater difficulty to the racers,
was deeply covered with soft and yielding sand. Still
further to enhance the labour, the youth sometimes
ran in armour, which admirably prepared them for the
vicissitudes of war, for pursuit after victory, or the
rapid movements of retreat. The high value which
the Greeks set upon swiftness may be learned from
the poems of Homer, where likewise are found the
most graphic and brilliant descriptions of the several
exercises. Some of these we shall here introduce
from Pope’s version, which in this part is peculiarly
199sustained and nervous. Speaking of the race between
Oilean Ajax, Odysseus, and Antilochos, he says:—[661]
“Ranged in a line the ready racers stand,
Pelides points the barrier with his hand.
All start at once, Oileus led the race;
The next Ulysses, measuring pace with pace,
Behind him diligently close he sped,
As closely following as the mazy thread
The spindle follows, and displays the charms
Of the fair spinster’s breast and moving arms.
Graceful in motion, thus his foe he plies,
And treads each footstep ere the dust can rise;
The glowing breath upon his shoulder plays,
Th’ admiring Greeks loud acclamations raise,
To him they give their wishes, heart, and eyes,
And send their souls before him as he flies.
Now three times turned, in prospect of the goal,
The panting chief to Pallas lifts his soul;
Assist, O Goddess, (thus in thought he prayed,)
And present at his thought descends the maid;
Buoyed by her heavenly force he seems to swim,
And feels a pinion lifting every limb.”
Next in the natural order, proceeding from the
simplest to the most artificial exercises, was leaping,
in which the youth among the Greeks delighted to
excel. In the performance of this exercise they usually
sprang from an artificial elevation (βατὴρ), and descended
upon the soft mould, which, when ploughed
up with their heels, was termed ἐσκαμμένα.[662] The
better to poise their bodies and enable them to bound
to a greater distance, they carried in their hands
metallic weights, denominated halteres,[663] in the form of
a semi disk, having on their inner faces handles like
the thong of a shield, through which the fingers were
passed. Extraordinary feats are related of these ancient
leapers. Chionis the Spartan and Phaÿllos the
Crotonian, being related to have cleared at one bound
200the space of fifty-two, or according to others, of fifty-five
feet.
With the latter account agrees the inscription on
the Crotonian’s statue:
“Phaÿllos leaped full five and fifty feet,
The discus flung one hundred wanting five.”
[664]
Homer briefly describes leaping among the sports
of the Phæacians:
“Amphialos sprang forward with a bound,
Superior in the leap a length of ground.”
[665]
To this succeeded pitching the quoit, which in the
Homeric age would appear to have been practised
with large stones or rude masses of iron. On ordinary
occasions it has been conjectured that one
discus only was used. But Odysseus, desirous of exhibiting
his strength to the Phæacians, converts into a
quoit the first block of stone within his reach.[666]
“Then striding forward with a furious bound
He wrenched a rocky fragment from the ground,
By far more ponderous and more large by far
Than what Phæacia’s sons discharged in air;
Fierce from his arm the enormous load he flings,
Sonorous through the shaded air it sings;
Couched to the earth, tempestuous as it flies,
The crowd gaze upwards while it cleaves the skies.
Beyond all marks, with many a giddy round,
Down rushing it upturns a hill of ground.”
The disk[667] in later times varied greatly both in
shape, size, and materials. Generally it would seem
to have been a cycloid, swelling in the middle and
growing thin towards the edges. Sometimes it was
perforated in the centre and hurled forward by a
thong, and on other occasions would appear to have
201approached the spherical form, when it was denominated
solos.[668]
Other of these exercises were shooting with the bow
at wisps of straw stuck upon a pole,[669] and darting the
javelin, sometimes with the naked hand and sometimes
with a thong wound about the centre of the
weapon. In the stadium at Olympia, the area
within which the pentathli leaped, pitched the
quoit, and hurled the javelin, appears to have been
marked out by two parallel trenches: but if these
existed likewise in the gymnasia, they must have
been extremely shallow, as we find in Antiphon[670] a
boy meeting with his death by inconsiderately running
across the area while the youths were engaged in this
exercise. Instead of throwing for the furthest, they
would seem, from the expressions of the orator, to
have aimed at a mark.
Wrestling[671] consisted of two kinds, the first, called
Orthopale, was that style, still commonly in use, in
which the antagonists, throwing their arms about each
other’s body, endeavoured to bring him to the ground.
In the other, called Anaclinopale, the wrestler who
distrusted his own strength but had confidence in his
courage and powers of endurance, voluntarily flung
himself upon the ground, bringing his adversary along
with him, and then by pinching, scratching, biting,
and every other species of annoyance, sought to compel
him to yield.
An example of wrestling in both its forms occurs in
Homer, where Ajax Telamon and Odysseus contend in
the funeral games for the prize.[672]
“Amid the ring each nervous rival stands,
Embracing rigid, with implicit hands;
Close locked above, their heads and arms are mixt;
Below their planted feet at distance fixt.
202Like two strong rafters which the builder forms
Proof to the wintry winds and howling storms;
Their tops connected, but at wider space
Fixed on the centre stands their solid base.
Now to the grasp each manly body bends,
The humid sweat from every pore descends,
Their bones resound with blows, sides, shoulders, thighs
Swell to each gripe, and bloody tumours rise.
Nor could Ulysses, for his art renowned,
O’erturn the strength of Ajax on the ground;
Nor could the strength of Ajax overthrow
The watchful caution of his artful foe.
While the long strife even tires the lookers-on,
Thus to Ulysses spoke great Telamon:
Or let me lift thee, Chief, or lift thou me,
Prove we our strength and Jove the rest decree.
He said; and straining heaved him off the ground
With matchless strength; that time Ulysses found
The strength t’ evade, and where the nerves combine
His ankle struck: the giant fell supine.
Ulysses following on his bosom lies,
Shouts of applause run rattling through the skies.
Ajax to lift Ulysses next essays;
He barely stirred him but he could not raise.
His knee locked fast the foe’s attempt defied,
And grappling close they tumbled side by side,
Defiled with honourable dust they roll,
Still breathing strife and unsubdued of soul.”
Boxing, which has very properly been called a rough
exercise, though condemned by physicians and philosophers,
was still practised in the gymnasium, sometimes
with the naked fist but more frequently with the cestus,
which consisted of a series of thongs, bound round
the hand and arm up to the elbow, or even higher.[673]
This exercise, however, seems to have been little practised,
except by those who designed to become athletæ
by profession. Homer has described the combat with
the cestus in its most terrible form.[674]
“Amid the circle now each champion stands,
And poises high in air his iron hands:
With clashing gauntlets now they firmly close,
Their crackling jaws re-echo to the blows,
203And painful sweat from all their members flows.
At length Epeus dealt a weighty blow
Full on the cheek of his unwary foe.
Beneath that ponderous arm’s resistless sway
Down dropped he powerless, and extended lay.
As a large fish, when winds and waters roar,
By some huge billow dashed against the shore,
Lies panting, not less battered with his wound,
The bleeding hero pants upon the ground.
To rear his fallen foe the victor lends
Scornful his hand, and gives him to his friends,
Whose arms support him reeling through the throng,
And dragging his disabled legs along.
Nodding, his head hangs down his shoulders o’er,
His mouth and nostrils pour the clotted gore.
Wrapped round in mist he lies, and lost to thought,
His friends receive the bowl too dearly bought.”
Among the exercises of the gymnasium which Hippocrates
advises to be practised during winter[675] and
bad weather, when it is necessary to remain under
cover, is walking on the tight rope. This feat seems
to have been so great a favourite among the youths of
antiquity, that they applied themselves to it with constant
assiduity, and arrived at length at a degree of
skill little inferior to that of our mountebanks. It
seems, in fact, to have been a common practice in the
gymnasium to run upon the tight rope. The Romans,
seeking in something to outdo the Greeks, taught an
elephant to perform a similar exploit.
Another branch of gymnastics consisted in the various
forms of the dance, to be ignorant of which was
at Athens esteemed a mark of an illiberal education.
To excel in this accomplishment was nearly by all the
Greeks[676] considered absolutely necessary, either as a
204preparation for the due performance of the movements
and evolutions of war, sustaining a proper part in the
religious choruses, or regulating the carriage with the
requisite grace and decorum in the various relations
of private life. Thus the Cretans, the Spartans, the
Thessalians, and the Bœotians, held this division of
gymnastics in especial honour, chiefly with a view to
war, while the Athenians, and Ionians generally, contemplated
it more as a means of developing the beauty
of the form, and conferring ease and elegance on the
gait and gesture. But because in treating of the theatre
I design fully to describe the several varieties of
scenic dances, I think it proper to throw together in
that place whatever I may have to say on this subject.[677]
To all these branches of gymnastics the Grecian
youth[678] applied themselves with peculiar eagerness, and
on quitting the schools devoted to them a considerable
portion of their time, since they were regarded
both as a preparation for victory in the Olympic and
other games, and as the best possible means for promoting
health and ripening the physical powers. Nor
could anything be easily conceived better suited to the
genius of their republics. In the first place, as I have
already observed, the wild and headstrong period of
youth was withdrawn by these agreeable exercises
from the desire and thoughts of evil, while a wholesome
feeling of equality was cultivated, and something
like brotherhood engendered in men destined to live
and act together. Besides what could more admirably
prepare them for fulfilling their duties as citizens and
more especially for defending their country, than a
system of physical training, which at the same time
brought to perfection their strength, their vigour, and
their manly beauty, and fitted them for the acquisition
of that peculiar species of glory which success in
the sacred games conferred? The acquisition, moreover,
205of robust health and that vigour of mind which
accompanies it, was a consideration second to none.
And it will readily be conceived that a judicious system
of exercises, such as we have described, would necessarily
render men patient of labour, inaccessible to
fear, and be productive at once of graceful habits and
lofty and honourable sentiments.
206
Among the sports and pastimes of the Greeks,
which may be considered as a kind of supplement to
gymnastics, we must class first the chase, which
Xenophon vainly hoped might be made to operate
as a check on the luxurious and effeminate habits
of his contemporaries.[679] But each age having its own
distinctive characteristic, it profits very little to aim
at engrafting the customs of one period of civilisation
upon another. The world will go its own gait.
Chuckfarthing and Pricking the Loop might as well
be recommended to young gentlemen and ladies dying
for love, as hunting to the population of a vain and
foppish city, to whom wild boars and wolves must
seem certain death. However, the country gentlemen,
and the agricultural population generally, long
in their own defence continued the practice of the
chase, though in Attica the absence of wild animals,
consequent upon a high and careful cultivation, had
reduced it at a very early period to a matter of mere
amusement.
But in remoter times, and in those parts of the
country where game always continued to abound,
there were never wanting persons who delighted in
the excitement of the chase. Herdsmen, particularly,
and shepherds, considered it part of their occupation.[680]
Thus we find Anchises a young Trojan chief, who
207inhabited the hill country, making his lair of bears
and lion-skins, the spoils of his own lance.[681] Sport, of
course, it would furnish to bold and reckless young
men, as lion and tiger hunting still does to our countrymen
in Northern India; but from this recreation
proceeded in some measure their safety, since where
wild beasts are numerous they not only devastate the
country,[682] trampling down the corn-fields and devouring
herds and flocks, but occasionally, if they chance to
find them unarmed, dine also upon their hunters.
Thus the chase of the Calydonian boar, the tally-ho’s
and view-halloes of which still sound fresh in song,
was undertaken by the Ætolians and Curetes, for the
purpose of delivering the rustic population from a
pest;[683] and precisely the same motive urged Alcmena’s
boy into the famous conflict with the Nemean lion,[684]
which he brought down with his invincible bow and
finished with his wild olive club. In like manner
Theseus, his rival in glory, slew the Marathonian bull;
and delivered the Cretans from another monster of
the same kind.[685] He engaged, too, with a sow of
great size at Crommyon on the confines of Corinthia,
and slaughtered the pig, an achievement of much
utility and no little glory.
The arms and accoutrements of these primitive
sportsmen corresponded with the rough service in
which they were engaged. Sometimes, to the attack
of the wild bull or the boar, they went forth with
formidable battle-axes.[686] But when their game was
fleet and innocuous a handful of light javelins and
the bow sufficed, as when Odysseus and his companions
beat the country in search of wild goats.[687] In the
Æneid, too, we find the hero doing great execution
among a herd of deer with his bow. Boar-spears also
were in use ere the period of the Trojan war, as
208Odysseus, who appears to have been excessively addicted
to the chase, is represented going thus armed
to the field with the sons of Autolycos when he
was wounded by the hog.[688] With the same weapon
we find Adrastos engaged in the same sport, killing
the son of Crœsos.[689] The chase of the lion, which
in Xenophon’s time could no longer be enjoyed in
Greece Proper, required the most daring courage
and the most formidable weapons, spears, javelins,
clubs, and burning torches, with which at last they
repelled him at night from the cattle stalls. Homer,
as usual, represents the contest to the life:[690]
“He turned to go, as slow retreats the lion from the stalls,
Whom men and dogs assault while round a shower of javelins falls.
They all night watch about their herds, lest he intent on prey
Should bear the flower of all their fields, the fattest bull away.
Onward impetuously he bounds—the hissing javelins fly
From daring hands, while torches send their blaze far up the sky.
He dreads, though fierce, the dazzling flames thick flashing on his sight,
And hungry still and breathing rage, retires with morning’s light.”
The existence of wild beasts in a country has by some
been enumerated among the causes of civilisation, and
it may, under certain circumstances, deserve to be so
considered, though generally such modes of accounting
for things are exceedingly unphilosophical. Mitford,
who advances it,[691] needed but to cast a glance across the
Mediterranean to dissipate his whole theory, since nowhere
are there more wild beasts or men less civilised
than in Africa. Egypt, Chaldæa, Assyria, the earliest
peopled countries, enjoyed few of these helps to refinement.
The reasons of Greek civilisation lay neither
in their country or in the accidents of it, but in the
race itself, which, as one family in a nation is distinguished
from its neighbours by superior genius, was
thus distinguished from other races of men. However,
the lion, as we have seen, formerly existed among
209them, though never probably in great numbers, and
even in the age of Herodotus was still found in a wild
tract of country extending from the Acheloös in Acarnania
to the Nestos in Thrace,[692] where in fabulous
times Olynthos, son of Strymon,[693] is said to have been
slain in a lion hunt. In the age of Dion Chrysostom,
however, this fierce animal was no longer known in
Europe.[694]
Dogs, all the world over and from the remotest
times, have been man’s companions in the chase, and
Homer, the noblest painter of the ancient world, has
bequeathed us many sketches of the antique hunting
breed. It has above been seen that in company with
man they feared not to attack even the lion. Odysseus’
famous dog Argos was a hound that
“Never missed in deepest woods the swift game to pursue
If once it glanced before his sight, for every track he knew.
[695]”
And again when the same sagacious Nimrod makes
his rounds in quest of “belly timber,” a brace of dogs
runs before him “examining the traces,” while with
boar-spear in hand he follows close at their heels.[696]
But already, even in those days, the habit of keeping
more cats than catch mice had got into fashion—that
is among the great—since we find grandees with their
κύνες τραπεζῆες or “table dogs,”[697] valued simply for
their beauty. Patroclus maintained nine of these
handsome animals, and Achilles understanding his
tastes, cast two of them into the flames of his funeral
pile, that their shades might sit at his board
in the realms below.[698]
Fowling too, if we may depend upon Athenæus,[699]
entered into the list of heroic amusements. It is
clear, however, that the sportsmen of those days were
arrant poachers, for, not content with attacking their
210prey in open fight, they condescended to spread nets
for them and set gins for their feet. But being accomplished
bowmen, however, they could occasionally,
when pressed for provisions, fetch down a thrush, a
pigeon, or a dove with an arrow, dexterously as that
Jew in Eusebius[700] who exhibited his marksmanship to
demonstrate the fallacy of augury. For in the funeral
games of Patroclus, we find one of the heroes hitting
from a considerable distance a dove which had
been tied by a small cord to the summit of a mast.[701]
They were given moreover not only to fishing
with nets—a practice in nowise unbecoming a hero
when in want of a dinner—but even to angling
with “crooked O’Shaughnessies,”[702] as Homer expresses
it; though the passage in the Iliad, indeed,
where a net is mentioned, cannot well be adduced
in corroboration, since it may refer to fowling as
well as to fishing.[703] Certain verses in the Odyssey,
however, prove beyond a doubt that the Greeks
had already begun to derive a great part of their
sustenance from the sea;[704] and the Homeric heroes
even understood the value of oysters, which, as appears
from the Iliad, were procured by diving.[705]
Nevertheless these ancient heroes, though by no
means averse as we have seen to pigeons or oysters,
delighted chiefly in the chase of the larger animals,
in which article of taste they agreed with Plato, who
considered all other kinds as unworthy of men.
He appears to have entertained an especial aversion
for the Isaac Waltons of the ancient world, and in
211his advice to youth earnestly exhorts them to eschew
hooks and fish-traps, which he slily classes with piracy
and house-breaking: and so he does fowling. Nor
would his generous philosophy countenance poaching
with nets and gins and snares. His sportsmen,
modelled after the old Homeric type, were to mount
their chargers,[706] and accompanied by their dogs come
to close quarters with their wild foes in open daylight,
and subdue them by dint of personal courage.[707] Precisely
similar views prevailed in the heroic age, when
the chiefs and principal men were exercised from boyhood
in the chase, as appears from the examples of
Achilles and Odysseus;[708] of whom the former, according
to Pindar, tried his hand at a lion at the age of
six years, ἐξέτης τοπρῶτον. Being swift of foot as
those Arabs of Northern Africa, who, as Leo[709] says,
are a match for any horse, he used without the aid of
dogs to overtake and bring down deer with his javelin,
and whatever prey he took he carried to his old
master Cheiron. This passage Mr. Cary has translated
in the following vigorous and elegant manner:—
“In Philyra’s house a flaxen boy
Achilles oft in rapturous joy
His feats of strength essayed.
Aloof like wind his little javelin flew,
The lion and the brinded boar he slew;
Then homeward to old Cheiron drew
Their panting carcases.
This when six years had fled;
And all the after time
Of his rejoicing prime
It was to Dian and the blue-eyed Maid
A wonder how he brought to ground
The stag without or toils or hound.
So fleet of foot was he.”
212Similar manners, if we may confide in Virgil,[710] prevailed
among the old inhabitants of Latium, and Xenophon[711]
in his monarchical Utopia trains the youth
in the same habits.
On hunting,[712] as practised in the civilised ages of
Greece, we possess more ample details, and it is
chiefly by the minuter touches that a picture of this
kind can be invested with interest and utility. Xenophon,
an aristocratic country gentleman, who living
in a corrupt age was, as I have said, wisely partial
to the nobler manners of the past, considers the chase
as a branch of education.[713] He does not, however,
entertain upon this subject the heroic views of Plato,
but, looking solely to utility, not only describes the
physical conditions and mental qualities of the hunter,
but the nets, poles, arms, and every implement made
use of by the ancients in the chase.
Not to interfere with the discipline of the schools
and the gymnasia, the youths were exhorted to betake
themselves to field-sports about the age of twenty.
Their notions of a sportsman’s costume differed materially
from our own, for instead of decking themselves
like our fox-hunters in scarlet, they selected the
soberest and least brilliant colours both for their
cloaks and chitons. The latter were in general extremely
short, reaching merely to the hams, as Artemis
is usually represented in works of art. But
the chlamys was long and ample, that it might be
twisted round the left arm in close contest with the
larger animals. Their hunting boots reached to the
knee, and were bound tight round the leg with
thongs. Probably also, as in travelling, they covered
their heads with a broad-brimmed hat.
The apparatus of a Greek sportsman would appear
somewhat cumbersome, and perhaps a little ludicrous
213to a modern Nimrod. But understanding their own
object they went their own way to work; their arms
and implements, varying with the chase in which they
were engaged, consisted of short swords, hunting
knives[714] for the purpose of cutting down brushwood
to stop up openings in the forest, axes for felling
trees, darts furnished with thongs for drawing them
back when they had missed their aim, bows, boar-spears,
weapons peculiarly formidable, nets small and
large, some for setting up in the plains, some for traversing
glades or narrow alleys in the woods, and
others shaped like a female head-net, to be placed in
small dusky openings, where being unperceived the
game sprang into them as into a sack, which closed
about it by means of a running cord, net-poles, forked
stakes, snares, gins, nooses, and leashes for the dogs.[715]
The darts used on these occasions had ashen or beechen
handles, and the nets were usually manufactured
with flax imported from Colchis on the Phasis, Egypt,
Carthage, and Sardinia.[716] Generally, too, they took
along with them the Lagobalon, a short, crooked stick
with a knob at one end, with which they sometimes
brought down the hare in its flight.[717] This practice,
common enough among poachers in our country, is
by them denominated squailing.
Without the aid of dogs, however, hunting is a poor
sport. The ancients, therefore, much addicted to this
branch of education, paid great attention to the breed
of these animals, of which some were sought to be
rendered celebrated by heroic and fabulous associationsassociations.
Thus the Castorides, it was said, sprang[718] from
a breed to which the twin god of Sparta was partial;
214the Alopecidæ were a cross between a dog and a
she-fox; and a third kind[719] arose from the mingling
of these two races. Among modern sportsmen, there
are also good authorities who prefer harriers with a
quarter of the fox-strain.[720] Other kinds of hounds, as
the Menelaides and Harmodian derived their appellation
from the persons who reared them.[721]
But the whole breeds of certain countries[722] were
famous, as the Argive, the Locrian, the Arcadian,
the Spanish, the Carian, the Eretrian; the Celtic or
greyhound (not known[723] in more ancient times); the
Psyllian, so called from a city of Achaia; the dog
of Elymæa, a country lying between Bactria and
Hyrcania; the Hyrcanian, which was a cross with
the lion; the Laconian, of which the bitch was more
generous,[724] sometimes crossed with the Cretan, which
was itself renowned for its nose, strength and courage,[725]
those which kept watch in the temple of Artemis
Dictynna having been reckoned a match even
for bears; the Molossian, less valued for the chase
than as a shepherd’s dog, on account of its great fierceness
and power to contend with wild beasts;[726] the
Cyrenaic, a cross with the wolf, and lastly the Indian,
on which the chief reliance was placed in the
chase of the wild boar. This breed, according to
Aristotle, was produced by crossing with the tiger,
probably the Cheeta.[727] The first and second removes
were considered too fierce and unmanageable, and
215it was not until the third generation that these tiger-mules
could be broken in to the use of the sportsman.
Some sought in mythology the origin of this
noble animal; for, according to Nicander, the hounds
of Actæon, recovering their senses after the destruction
of their master, fled across the Euphrates and
wandered as far as India. Strange stories are related
of this breed, of which some it is said would
contend with no animal but the lion. Alexander’s
dog, which he purchased in India for a hundred minæ,
had twice overcome and slain the monarch of the
forest.[728]
Let us, therefore, now imagine the hounds exactly
what they ought to be, and observe under what circumstances
they were led afield. As in England,
their principal sport was the hare. In winter,[729]
it was observed that puss, from the length of the
nights, took a wider circuit, and therefore afforded
the dogs a better chance of detecting her traces.[730]
But when in the morning the ground was covered
with ice or white with hoar-frost, the dogs lost their
scent, as also amidst abundant dews or after heavy
rains. The sportsman accordingly waited till the
sun was some way up the sky, and had begun to
quicken the subtile odours communicated to the
earth.[731] The west wind,[732] which covers the heavens
with vast clouds and fills the air with moisture,
and the south blowing warm and humid, weaken
the scent; but the north wind fixes and preserves
216it.[733] By moonlight, too, as the old sportsmen remark,
and the warmth it emits, the scent is affected;
besides that when the moon shines brightly, in their
frolicsome and sportive mood the hares, in the secluded
glades of the forest, take long leaps and
bounds over the green sward, leaving wide intervals
between their traces.[734]
From a remark of Xenophon it appears that at
least on one point the sportsmen of antiquity were
less humane than the modern, since they pursued
the chase even in breeding time.[735] They, however,
spared the young in honour of Artemis;[736] the spirit
even of false religion, on this, as on many other occasions,
strengthening the impulses of humanity.
Several causes coöperated to render hares unplentiful
on the Hellenic continent,—the number of sportsmen,
of foxes which devoured both them and their
young, and of eagles that delighted in its lofty and
almost inaccessible mountains, and shared its game
with the huntsman and the fox. Homer, in a
few picturesque words, describes the war carried on
against puss by this destructive bird.[737] On the
islands, whether inhabited or not, few of these obstacles
to their increase existed. Sportsmen rarely
passed over to them, and in such as were sacred to
any of the gods the introduction of dogs was not
permitted, so that, like the pigeons and turtle-doves
of Mekka, they multiplied in those holy haunts prodigiously.
It was prohibited by the laws of Attica[738] to commit
the slightest trespass during the chase. The sportsman
was not allowed to traverse any ground under
cultivation, to disturb the course of running water, or
217to invade the sanctity of fountains. The scene of
action accordingly lay among the woods and mountains,
the common property of the republic, or, if not,
abandoned by general consent to the use of the sportsman.
Such were, for example, the woodland districts
of Parnes and Cithæron on the borders of Bœotia. Towards
these the huntsman, well shod, plainly and
lightly dressed,[739] and with a stick in his hand, set out
about sunrise in winter, in summer before day.[740] On
the road strict silence was observed[741] lest the hare
should take the alarm and to her heels. Having
reached the cover, the dogs were tied separately that
they might be let slip the more easily, the nets were
spread in the proper places, the net-guards set, and
the huntsman with his dogs proceeded to start the
game, first piously making a votive offering of the
primitiæ to Apollo and Artemis,[742] divinities of the
chase.[743]
And now, exclaims the leader of the Ten Thousand,
I behold the hounds, joyous and full of fire, spring
forward in the track of their game. Eagerly and
ardently do they pursue it—they traverse—they run
218about in a circle—they advance now in a straight
line, now bounding away obliquely—they plunge into
the thickets, across the glades, through the paths,
known or unknown, hurrying one before the other,
shaking their tails, their ears hanging low,[744] their eyes
flashing with fire. Drawing near the game they indicate
the fact to their master by their movements,
kindling up into a warlike humour, bounding emulously
forward, scorning all thought of fatigue,—now
in a body, now singly,—till reaching the hiding-place[745]
of the hare they spring towards it all at once. In the
midst of shouts and barking the swift animal glances
from her form with the hounds at her heels. The
huntsman, his left hand wrapped in his chlamys, follows
staff in hand, animating his dogs, but avoiding,
even if in his power, to head the game.[746]
A singular species of chase, now common in our
own rabbit-warrens, appears to have passed over from
Africa to the Balearic Isles, in an ancient account of
which the first mention of it occurs. Those islands,
it is said, were almost entirely exempted from vermin,
but, on the other hand, contained prodigious numbers
of rabbits, which almost destroyed every herb and
plant by biting their roots. At length, however, they
discovered a remedy for this evil. They imported
ferrets from Africa, which, having first muzzled them,
they let loose in the rabbit-warrens. Creeping into
the holes they scared forth the inmates, which were
caught by the sportsman. Strabo, who relates the
circumstance, calls the ferret a “wild cat.” Pliny,
having likewise described the devastations of the
rabbits, speaks of it under the name of viverra, and
says it was held in great estimation for its utility in
this chase, which in the seventeenth century was practised
in the island of Procida, where they procured
the animal from Sicily, and denominated it Foretta,
219whence the English name. The common Italian appellation
was donnola.[747]
It is clear, however, that in classic times the
ferret was unknown in Greece, otherwise we should
never have heard of the proverb of the Carpathian
and his Hare[748] applied to persons who brought evil
upon themselves. Originally, we are told, the
Island of Carpathos[749] was, like Ithaca, entirely
destitute of hares; but a pair having been at
length introduced, multiplied so prodigiously that
they almost depopulated the island by devouring the
fruits of the earth. A similar fact is related of the
island Porto Santo, near Madeira, for Prince Henry of
Portugal, immediately after its discovery, “sent Bartholomew
Perestrello with seeds to sow and cattle to
stock the place; but one couple of rabbits put in
among the rest increased so prodigiously that all
corn and plants being destroyed by them it was
found necessary to unpeople the place.”[750]
A peculiar kind of hare is commemorated by the
ancients as found in Elymœa. It is said to have been
little inferior in size to the fox, to have been elongated
and slender in shape, and blackish in colour, with a
long white tip at the end of the tail. It is remarked
by the same writer that the scent left by leverets
on the ground is stronger and more pungent than that
of the grown hare, so that the dogs become furious on
getting wind of it.[751]
From the chase of the hare and rabbit we pass on
to that of the fawn and the stag, in which they made
use of Indian dogs,[752] animals of great strength, size,
speed, and courage. Fawns[753] were hunted in spring,
220the season of their birth. The first step was for the
sportsman to beat up the woods to discover where the
deer were numerous; and having found a proper
place he returned thither before day, armed with javelins,
and accompanied by a game-keeper with a pack
of hounds. The dogs were kept in leash afar off, lest
they should give tongue at the sight of the deer. He
himself took his station on the look-out. At break of
day[754] the does, with their yellowish and richly-speckled
skins, were seen issuing from the thickets, followed
by their still more delicately-spotted fawns, which
they led to the places[755] where they usually suckled
them, while the stags stationed themselves at a distance,
as an advanced guard, to defend them from all
intruders. The graceful creatures then lay down to
perform their matronly office, looking round watchfully
the while to observe whether they were discovered.
This pleasing task completed, they, like the
stags, posted themselves in a circle about their fawns
to protect them. Sportsmen have no sentiment. At
the very moment when this most beautiful exhibition
of mute affection would have warmed with sympathy
the heart of the philosopher or the poet, the dogs
were let loose, while their master and his companions,
armed with javelins, closed upon the game. The
fawn itself, unless chilled and drenched by the dew—in
which case it frisked about—would remain still in
its place and be taken. But on hearing its cries the
doe rushed forward to deliver it, and was smitten
down by the javelins or torn to pieces by the dogs.
The chase of the female elephant in Africa exhibits
the same traits of affection in the brute and ferocity
in man. In this case the young will fight for his
mother, or the mother for her young till death.
221When the fawn had attained any considerable size,
and begun to feed among the herd, the chase of it
became more arduous. The fidelity of instinctive
love, opposed to human sagacity, exhibited all its
force. Closing round their young and drawing up
in front of them, the stags, emboldened by affection,
trampled the dogs under their feet, frequently to
death, unless the huntsman, dashing into the midst
of them, could succeed in detaching a single animal
from the herd. But, supposing this done, the hounds
at first remained far behind the fawn, which, terrified
at finding itself alone, bounded along with incredible
velocity, though, its strength soon failing, it in the
end fell a prey to the hunter.
The object of the ancients, however, in the chase
not being simple sport, but to obtain possession by
the shortest method possible of the game, they set
snares in the narrows of the mountains, around the
meadows, near the streams and freshes, and in the
thickets—wherever, in short, stags could be taken.
Pitfalls, too, were dug, as in Africa for the lion,[756]
and most of those stratagems resorted to which the
Nubians and Egyptian Arabs put in practice against
the gazelle. It was in fact common to erect, with
rough stones or wood, a sort of skreen, perhaps semicircular,
like those behind which the hunters of
the desert hide, to conceal themselves when lying
in wait for the game.[757]
For the chase of the wild boar,[758] at once a manly
and a useful sport, somewhat complicated preparations
were necessary. In this the dogs of India, of Crete,
of Locris, of Sparta, hunted side by side, and the
sportsman took the field armed with strong nets,
javelins, hunting poles, and snares. The boar-spears
222of the ancients[759] were most carefully fashioned, with
a broad sharp head and handle of tough wood. So
likewise were their hunting-poles armed with long
iron points, fixed in brazen sockets, with a shaft of
service wood. Footsnares of great strength were set
at intervals. This was not the sport of a solitary
hunter. They went out in considerable numbers,
and kept close together, finding still, for lack of fire-arms,
no small difficulty in coping with the foe. On
reaching the spot where they supposed the hog to
be ensconced, the dogs were all led carefully in leash
with the exception of one Spartan hound, which was
let loose and accompanied in all his movements.
When he appeared to have found the track, they
followed him, and he thus took the lead in the chase.
Numerous signs also directed the movements of the
hunter; in soft places the track, broken branches in
thickets, and in forests the wounds on the bark of
trees, given by the boar in sharpening his tusks as
he passed.[760]
Generally the traces were found leading to some
sheltered nook, warm in winter, in summer cool, where
the boar made his lair. On discovering him the dog
gave tongue, but the animal in general refused to rise.
The hound was then withdrawn and put in leash with
the others, and every opening, save one, leading to the
place, closed with nets, the upper ends of which were
passed over the forks of trees. The nets were hung
so as to belly outwards, and carefully disposed so that
they could be seen through. Bushes cut hastily supported
them on either side, and closed every aperture
through which the game could attempt to force a way.
This done the hounds were all slipped, and the hunters,
armed with pikes and spears, entered the netted
223enclosure. One of the boldest and most experienced
led the dogs; the others followed at intervals, leaving
an ample space between them for the boar, which if
closely hemmed in might have inflicted on his opponents
the fate of Adonis. Presently the hounds sprang
all at once upon the game, which rising in sudden
alarm tossed the first it encountered into the air, and
breaking through the pack made away towards the
nets, followed by men and dogs in full cry. On finding
the unaccustomed opposition, he would, if running
down hill, plunge right forward to force his way
through; if in a plain he would stand still, glaring
fiercely around.
The dogs, however, soon closed upon his track, while
the hunters galled him with javelins and stones, approaching
closer and closer till he was driven by his
own impetuosity into the nets. Upon this the most
daring of his pursuers drew near, pike in hand, and
sought to put an end to the contest by piercing
him in the head. Sometimes, notwithstanding all
they could do, instead of plunging into the toils he
would turn upon them; in which case some dexterous
sportsman, armed with spear or pike, usually presented
himself to receive his charge with one foot advanced,
impelling the weapon with the right hand, directing
it with the left. Instead, however, of rushing on at
once the hog would perhaps pause a moment to
reconnoitre, when it behoved his antagonist carefully
to mark every movement of his head or glance of his
eye.[761] For in the very moment that a blow was aimed
at him, he would sometimes dash the spear aside with
tusk or snout, and the next moment be upon his
enemy, whose only chance of safety now consisted in
throwing himself instantaneously on his face, and holding
fast by whatever he could grasp, since, the tusks
of the boar curving upwards, he found it difficult to
gore his enemy thus lying, and failing to turn him
over would in his fury trample on him. A second
224hunter now rushed forward to deliver his companion,
and usually drew off the hog by dexterous attacks in
flank. The fallen sportsman, recovering at the same
time his feet and his spear, must by the laws of the
chase return to the combat, and could only secure
his reputation by immolating his foe. By this time,
indeed, the task had generally become easier; for, rendered
reckless by fury, he would throw himself impetuously
on their pikes, which, but for the protecting
guards at the head, would have gone through him
handle and all. His whole frame now appeared to be
kindled with rage, his blood boiling, his eyes flashing,
and his tusks so nearly on fire that if brought in contact
with hair at the moment of death, they would
frizzle it like a red-hot iron.[762]
Of the hunting of the bear[763] the ancients have left
us no exact description. As this animal abounded,
however, in most parts of Greece, where it was extremely
troublesome and destructive, particularly to
the fruit-trees, various expedients were hit upon for
taking and destroying it. Sometimes it was pursued
as game and brought down by the bow; but the common
method appears to have been to make use of
traps and snares. They dug, for example, a deep
trench round one of those trees in the fruit of which
the bear particularly delighted, and covering it with
225reeds or brittle branches, they sprinkled thereon a thin
layer of earth, and concealed the whole apparatus with
fresh grass. The bear, proceeding as usual towards
the tree on his thievish errand, broke in the roof of
the pit with his weight, and was caught. Even in the
most civilised times this animal had not been wholly
extirpated from Attica,[764] but, as well as the boar, was
found on Mount Parnes. In Laconia also, through
the whole range of Taygetos, it abounded, together
with hogs, deer, and wild goats. Bruin was sacrificed
in Achaia to Artemis Laphria. In Thrace the white
bear was found.[765]
Respecting the habits of the Grecian bear the
ancients have left us some few facts which may be
worth repeating. When it comes forth from the
den,[766] where it has passed the winter, it is said to
chew bits of wood, and to feed on snake-weed, wake-robin,
or cuckoo-pint (arum maculatum[767]), which has a
purgative power. These operations performed, its
ravenous appetites immediately awake, and it commences
its devastations in the farm-yard, the orchard
and the apiary. Delighting greatly in honey
it attacks and overthrows the hives which it tears to
pieces in order to devour the combs, though Pliny[768]
adduces another reason for this fact, exceedingly
characteristic of that writer. He says that the bear,
after his winter sleep, finding his eyes dim and his
head heavy, applies to the bees as to skilful oculists,
that in revenge for robbing them of their honey,
sting him angrily about the face, which by letting
much blood relieves him at once from his ophthalmia
and his headacheheadache. The bear, it is well known,
226is omnivorous like man. He accordingly plunders the
bean-fields, and feeds on every kind of pulse. In
robbing orchards,[769] too, his courage and ability are
great, being as I have said as complete an adept
as a school-boy in climbing trees, out of which when
he has satisfied himself he descends, like the aforesaid
mischievous beast, feet foremost. When none of
the delicacies above enumerated was within his reach,
the bear would feed on ants, crabs, or any kind of
vermin, but preferred of course the flesh of the
larger animals, such as the stag, the wild boar, and
the bull. His mode of taking his prey was curious.
Upon the boar and stag he probably dropped from
his hiding place in the trees, but the stratagem by
which he usually got the bull into his power was
this.[770] Throwing himself on the ground directly in
his way he provoked the lord of the herd to gore
him, upon which, seizing his horns, and fastening ravenously
upon his shoulder, he brought him to the
ground, where he fed upon his carcass at leisure.
When flying from the more terrible face of man,
the female usually drove her young before her, or
taking them up in her mouth or on her back, she
would endeavour to escape with them into the trees.[771]
As the lion was not found in Greece in the
civilised periods of its history, the chase of it cannot
be said to have formed an Hellenic amusement.[772]
They might, however, by proceeding a little beyond
the borders in their colonies of Thrace and Asia
Minor, on Mount Pangæos, on the Mysian Olympos,
and in Syria, enjoy this dangerous pastime if they
desired it. In all those countries, however, both
the lion,[773] the panther, the pard, the lynx, and other
227animals of this destructive class had been confined
to the mountains, where, as an acute and experienced
observer has remarked, they lose much of
their force and ferocity. The expression made use
of by Xenophon proves in fact that the dread of
man had driven them almost into inaccessible fastnesses,
whither they could not be pursued by the
hunter, so that they were chiefly taken in their
descent to the lowlands by poisoning, with aconite,[774]
the waters or the baits which they set for them:
sometimes, indeed, when want compelled them into
the plains, parties of hunters on horseback, and
armed to the teeth, would assault and destroy them,
not without imminent peril. Pitfalls, too, of ingenious
construction were dug for them, having an
earthen pillar in the centre on which a goat was
tied.[775] The encircling moat, like that above described,
destined for the bear, was concealed by a
covering of slender bushes which, breaking under
them, they were precipitated to the bottom and
there killed. The wolf, though a sacred animal[776]
in Attica, had by the laws a price set upon his
head, at which Menage[777] wonders, though the Egyptians
also slaughtered their sacred crocodiles, when
they exceeded a certain size.
In the chase of the wild goat the bow, among
the mountains of Crete, was made use of, and so
skilful as marksmen were the Cretans[778] that from
the depths of the valleys they would bring down
228their game from the pinnacles of the loftiest cliffs.[779]
They were fabled to have been taught the art of
hunting by the Curetes, and, practising it constantly
in steep and difficult places, they acquired great
suppleness and agility of body, and were exceedingly
swift of foot.[780]
The Macedonians, too, were both practised and
enthusiastic sportsmen, and delighted in the amusement
even whilst engaged in their most toilsome
expeditions. Thus during the campaigns of Alexander
in Asia, we find the generals Leonatos and
Menelaos or Philotas[781] carrying about among their
baggage, linen skreens, ten or twelve miles in length,
which during their halts they caused to be stretched
round a given district, where they hunted as in a
park. An anecdote is related strikingly illustrating
the high estimation in which the chase was held
at the court and among the nobles of Macedonia,
where it was customary for the son to sit upright
on a chair at his father’s table and not to recline
among the guests until he had slain a wild boar
out of the toils. Cassander, son of Antipater, continued,
it is said,[782] up to his thirty-fifth year bolt
upright at the regal board, because, though a brave
man and a skilful hunter, fortune had constantly
denied him the pleasure of despatching the hog after
the prescribed fashion.
There is one department of the chase, and that
perhaps the most curious and interesting, which was
not practised by the Greeks of classical times, though
it cannot be said to have been unknown to them;
I mean falconry, described by several ancient writers
229as it was pursued in India and in Thrace. If I
give a short description of it, therefore, it must be
regarded as a digression introduced for the purpose
of completing, as far as possible, the circle of ancient
amusements. Ctesias,[783] who was contemporary
with Socrates, and published his Indian history four
hundred years before Christ, seems to be the
oldest writer by whom falconry is mentioned. He
tells us that among the Hindùs hares and foxes
were hunted with kites, ravens, and eagles, and minutely
describes the way in which the birds were
broken in. Having been caught while young, they
were first taught to fly at tame hares and foxes
in the following manner. The animals with pieces
of flesh tied to them were started in sight of the
falcons, which were immediately let loose and sent
in pursuit. When they caught and brought back
the game the flesh was given them as their reward,
and by this bait and allurement they were encouraged
to persevere. When sufficiently trained, they
were taken to the mountains and flown against wild
hares and foxes. The passion for falconry is still
kept alive in the East, particularly in Persia, where
the shâh-baz, or royal falcon, is flown against hares
and antelopes, occasionally invested with leathers,
which protect him from being torn asunder.[784] But
the most daring and dangerous service in which falcons
have ever been employed is the chase of the
wild horse by the Turcomâns of Khiva on the eastern
shores of the Caspian.[785] A more detailed description
of ancient falconry than that given by Ctesias
is found in a work attributed to Aristotle.[786] It is
said, observes this writer, that the youth of Thrace,
who were addicted to hunting, pursued their game
by the assistance of hawks. On arriving upon
230the ground, the falcon, which had evidently been
trained for the purpose, obeyed the calls of the
sportsmen and chased the birds into the thickets,
where they were knocked down with hunting-poles
and taken. Even when the falcons themselves captured
the game, they brought it to the hunters,
who as in modern times gave them, as a reward,
some portion of the animal.
In their fowling they made use of great cruelty:—Pigeons
and turtle-doves were commonly blinded,
to be used as decoys, and in this condition would
sometimes live eight years.[787] Partridges were employed
for the same purpose in a different manner.
The male bird having been tamed was put out in
the neighbourhood of a covey, upon which the boldest
of the wild birds came forward to fight him,
and was secured with the net. The challenge was
usually accepted by every male bird in the covey
until one after another they were all taken. When
the female was employed she drew them successively
to the nets by her call.[788] The first that is deluded
is generally the principal cock in the covey, which
the others collecting together seek to drive away.
To elude their pursuit the leader sometimes drew
near the decoy in silence, that he might not have
to contend with the other males. Not unfrequently
they would descend and allow themselves at such
times to be caught on the roofs of the houses.[789]
The Greeks established at Alexandria had, according
to Athenæus, who was a native of Egypt, a kind
of chase peculiar to themselves, viz. that of the
horned owl. The sophist of Naucratis has indeed
been suspected of confounding the ὠτὸς with the ὠτὶς,
231that is, the owl with the bustard;[790] but it having
been in his power to examine what he relates, I shall
lay his account before the reader, who will judge
for himself. This bird, it is said, is found in great
numbers in the desert near Alexandria, (though I
myself saw none there,) and is as much given to
mimicry as a monkey. Above all things he is
ambitious of imitating man, and, as far as possible,
will do whatever he sees done by the fowler. Aware
of his propensity in this way, these gentlemen, when
desirous of taking an owl, carried along with them
into the desert a thick tenacious glue, with which
on coming within eyeshot of the Otos they affected
to anoint their eyes. Then laying down the glue-pot
on the sand they retreated to some hollow for concealment.
Upon this the owl having watchfully observed
their movements, approached, and covering his eyes
with the treacherous ointment was blinded and taken.
Another mode of catching this bird also prevailed.
It having been discovered that he was as partial as
the Bedouin Arab to the company of a horse, the
fowlers covered themselves with horses’ skins, and
in this disguise approaching the flock were enabled
to catch as many as they pleased. A third method
of taking the Otos was one which exposed the
unfortunate bird to the ridicule of the comic poets.
The fowlers setting out upon the chase in pairs,
separated at coming in sight of the game. One of
the two then stepped out in front of the game and
commenced a jig, upon which the thoughtless mimic
immediately did the same, beating exact time with
his feet, and keeping his eye fixed upon his wily
teacher. While the merry victim was thus engaged,
capering, springing, and pirouetting like a feathered
Taglioni, the other bird-catcher approached from
behind and seized him by the neck.
The same story is related by other writers of the
232Scops or mocking-owl, in imitation of whose movements,
the ancients had a celebrated dance.[791]
Quails in certain seasons of the year frequent
Greece in vast numbers, as they do Egypt and Southern
Italy.[792] It has been supposed that the island of
Delos received the name of Ortygia from the quails
(ὄρτυγες), which alighted on it in great numbers during
their migration towards the north. They were likewise
plentiful in Phœnicia,[793] where they sacrificed them to
Heracles. Numerous contrivances were resorted to
for catching this bird. During pairing time it was
taken as follows: mirrors were set up in the fields with
snares in front of them, and the quail running towards
the imaginary bird was there entrapped. Clearchos
of Soli describes a curious mode of capturing jackdaws.
In places frequented by those birds they used, he says,
to lay broad vessels filled to the brim with oil.
Presently the jackdaws, curious and prying in their
temper, would alight on the edges, and, being vastly
pleased with the reflection of their own beauty, would
chuckle over it and clap their wings, till becoming
saturated with oil the feathers stuck together and
they could no longer fly.
233
Having thus drawn as complete a picture as the
plan of our work would permit, of the physical training
of the Greeks in all its branches, comprehending
Gymnastics properly so called, together with those
other exercises which under the name of field-sports
were enjoyed rather than studied under the lead of
no master but experience, we now return to that
mental discipline, which for the most part exerted
its influence in the developement of the intellectual
faculties at the same time that the foregoing bodily
discipline brought forth all the energies of the frame.
We shall thus have traversed the whole circle of Hellenic
education, when we shall have exhibited the
youth passing through the schools of the philosophers
and sophists into the world.[794]
Their mode of teaching differed very materially
from ours. It scarcely seemed an object with them
to devour large quantities of learning, but going
leisurely again and again over the same ground they
appeared to give the lessons they received time to
sink like gentle rain into their minds. Some advantage,
too, arose from their method of teaching, as far
as possible, orally. The master was to them instead
of a library. A book has but one set of phrases for
all. But the living teacher, if he found his pupils
could not rise to his language, could lower it to meet
them half-way, could be brief or expansive, or general
or minute, as the necessities of the moment required.
There was a familiarity, too, in the relation,
234scarcely compatible with our manners. The youth
forgot he was learning, and rather supposed himself
to be searching in the company of a friend for truths
equally unknown to both. This appears to have been
more particularly the case in their moral studies,[795] at
least in the Socratic schools, where all the pomp of
wisdom was laid aside that it might be the more
popular.
It has been already remarked that the first lessons
in morals were learned from the poets, whom, in my
opinion, Plato wrongs most egregiously when he arraigns
their fables as so many sources of immorality.[796]
He appears, in fact, wilfully to confound them with
those impostors, the purificators and diviners, who
furnished the Popes with the original hint of penitences
and indulgencies, and expiating crimes by
proxy. But this is unjust. It is visiting the sins
of low and sensual versifiers upon the divine heads of
bards whom heaven itself had inspired. However
this may be, upon the Greeks young and old no
teachers exercised so powerful an influence as the
poets, who, from Homer down to Callistratos,[797] whether
in epic or after-dinner song, wielded the empire
of their feelings despotically, prompting them to actions
pregnant with renown. And the avidity with
which their lessons were imbibed, is compared to that
of a swarm of bees alighting (ἐπιπτομένοι)[798] on a bed
of spring flowers. In fact, what Jason of Pheræ said
of himself,—that he was devoured by the love of empire[799]—appears
to have been true of the Athenian
youth, in their irrepressible thirst after knowledge.
Such of them, at least, as were εὐφυεῖς καὶ ἱκανοὶἱκανοὶ, are said
235to have hungered fiercely after philosophy, and that
not for any particular part but for the whole. And
Socrates declares that he who while young is fastidious
in his studies, rejecting this, disliking that, before
mature reason has taught him which is useful and
which is not, may consider himself what he pleases,
but can never be great in learning or philosophy. To
excel in these it is necessary insatiably to covet
every kind of instruction, and joyfully to enter on
the acquisition of it. He says, indeed, that they resemble
sight-seers, greedy of every spectacle; or
musical people, who are led by the ear wherever
fiddling and singing are going forward; except that,
with the latter pleasure is the sole motive, with the
former an exalted passion for truth.[800] But what
truths are the object of philosophy? Those which
have regard to the nature and attributes of goodness,
from which, as from a fountain, flow all the usefulness
and advantages of virtue. Philosophy in Greece comprehended
religion, and to be religious was to act
justly, benevolently, mercifully towards men, humbly
and piously towards God. To live thus, that is, to
be virtuous, they considered it necessary to possess a
knowledge of the whole theory of ethics, since virtue,
in their opinion, is incompatible with ignorance.
But man, besides being a moral being, accountable to
God, is a political being, accountable to the laws of
his country. He has duties also to perform towards
that country. To perform these properly he must
comprehend the nature of a state, and the relations
subsisting between the state and the individuals who
compose it; that is, he must be acquainted with the
science of politics. Again in all free states, reasoning
and persuasion, not blind will and brute force,
are the instruments of government. The citizen
must, therefore, be versed in logic and eloquence,[801]
that he may think correctly and explain clearly and
236forcibly to others the convictions which determine
his own judgment. We have thus a cycle of Greek
studies with the reasons on which they were founded.
With regard to their religious education, which
commenced in the nursery and was interwoven with
every other study, it may be observed that without
it no person at Athens could rise to any eminence,
or command, even in private life, the respect of his
fellow-citizens. To be in favour with them a man
must be supposed to stand well with the gods. They
conceived, in fact, that while conscience remained
unstifled, there would be a sense of religion, and that
when this went, probity, for the most part, and honour
fled along with it. For regarding the deity in the
light of a parent,—"we are all his offspring,"—irreligion
appeared to them something like a disposition
to parricide, a compound of injustice with the
basest and most atrocious ingratitude. Arrived at this
pitch, a man to compass his ends would scruple at
nothing. They, therefore, regarded every symptom
of impiety as a blow aimed at the democracy, of
which Zeus was king. He who tramples on his
country’s religion, which is the basis of all its laws,
will infallibly, if it be in his power, trample next
on those laws themselves, and next on his fellow-citizens
whom the laws protect. Hence the terror,
the vengeance, and, indeed, the cruelty arising out
of the mutilation of the Hermæ, and the profanation
of the mysteries, and the prosecution which followed,
of Alcibiades, Andocides, and the rest. An
attempt had been made to break down that enclosure
of reverential sanctity which surrounded the
commonwealth, and commended it to the protection
of heaven. They considered the act a formal renouncing
of the Almighty, and feared,—so imperfect
were their notions,—lest the impiety of the few
should redound to the detriment of the whole.
The remark is common in the mouths[802] of men
237that the education of the people should be conformable
to the spirit of their institutions. But this is
a mere truism, and means no more than this,—that
men should not be enjoined one thing by their laws
and political constitution, and another by the habits
and maxims taught in youth. The grand difficulty,
however, always has been to make them so to harmonise
in practice that they should be but two parts
of the same system.
In monarchies[803] a spirit of exclusion, something
like that on which the system of castes is built,
must pervade the whole business of education.
The nobility must have schools to themselves,
or, if wealthy plebeians be suffered to mingle
with them, superior honour and consideration must
be yielded to the former. The masters must look
up to them and to their families, not to the people
for preferment and advancement; and the plebeians,
though superior in number, must be weak in influence,
and be taught to borrow their tone from the privileged
students.
In an oligarchy, properly so called, there should be
no mingling of the classes at all. Schools must be
established expressly for the governors, and others
for the governed. The basis of education should be
the notion that some men were born for rule and
others for subjection; that the happiness of individuals
depends on uninquiring submission to authority;
that their rulers are wise and they unwise; that all
they have to do with the laws is to obey them;
and all teachers must be made to feel that their
admission among the great depends on the faithful
advocacy of such notions.
In free states, again, the contrary course will best
promote the ends of government; the schools must
238be strictly public, and not merely theoretically but
practically open to all. There should be no compulsion
to attend them, but ignorance of the things
there taught should involve a forfeiture of civil
rights as much as being of unsound mind; for in
truth, an ignorant man is not of sound mind, any
more than one unable to use all his limbs is of sound
body. Here the discipline must be very severe.
A spirit rigidly puritanical must pervade the studies
and preside over the amusements. Every tendency
irreligious, immoral, ungentlemanly, as unworthy the
dignity of freedom, should be nipped in the bud. The
students must be taught to despise all other distinctions
but those of virtue and genius, in other words
the power to serve the community. They should
be taught to contemplate humanity as in other respects
wholly on the same level, with nothing above
it but the laws. The teachers must be dependent
on the people alone, and owe their success to
their own abilities and popular manners. And this
last in a great measure was the spirit of Athenian
education.[804]
The best proof[805] that could be furnished of the
excellence of a system of education would be its
rendering a people almost independent of government,
that is swayed more by their habits than by
the laws. This was preëminently the case with
the Athenians. They required to be very little
meddled with by their rulers. Instructed in their
duties and the reason which rendered them duties,
accustomed from childhood to perform them, they
239lived as moral and educated men live still, independent
of the laws.
This was the effect. The causes must be sought
in their discipline and studies. I have observed
that among them a principal subject of investigation
was the science of politics, that is the science
according to the principles of which states are
framed and preserved. Nor did they, as some do,
conduct their studies in that cold manner in which
men investigate matters of mere curiosity, or things
they are never to do more than converse or write
about. They studied it as a profession, as a means
of rising to power, and through power to fame, that
is with all the ardour and earnestness of which enthusiastic
youth is capable. Education by this means
exerted an influence unknown under other forms of
government. A consciousness that they were engaged
in a sort of sacred contest, of which all
Greece was spectator, pervaded the youth of every
rank, and impelled them irresistibly into that course
of studies which promised the greatest probability
of success. Hence, no doubt much of the enthusiasm
with which philosophy was cultivated. It was
often not so much the abstract love of wisdom as
a conviction of the political value of that wisdom
which filled the schools of the great men who
taught at Athens, whether they were physiologists,
mathematicians, masters of music, of strategy, or of
eloquence. The example of Pericles applying himself
to natural philosophy under Anaxagoras, and
deriving thence those streams of pure and masculine
eloquence which overflowed the Pnyx, operated
forcibly on public opinion. By the same arts and
studies men hoped to mount to equal elevation,
forgetting that Anaxagoras only watered the plant
spontaneously produced by nature.
However, the hopes and aspirations I have described
filled the schools first of the philosophers, then of
the sophists. And this is the natural course of
things. Few pursue wisdom for its own sake, in
240order that it may purify and render holy their own
minds. And by this dispensation of Providence society
is a gainer; for, as man is constituted, no sooner
does he possess any mental excellence, any knowledge
or art or experience, which can be rendered
available, than he comes eagerly forward with
it to extort praise or reward from the community
by conferring benefits upon it. The examples of
reserve in this matter are few, nor, in fact, are they
to be commended who in this or in any thing else
hide their light under a bushel; and therefore Plato
is wrong when he teaches that wise men will as a
rule abstain from intermeddling with state affairs,
unless constrained thereto by fines and menaces.
He confesses, indeed, that the worst of all punishments
is to be governed by evil men, and that to
avoid this even philosophers will consent to hold
the reins of government.[806] But where they do not,
they are always in free states the masters of those
who do. Their schools were the colleges and universities
of the ancient world, and so long as freedom
endured the great object of their philosophy was to
create able citizens and a happy state. On this account
their remains are still instinct with life. Their
object was gradually to ripen human nature into
perfection by perfecting its education and its institutions.
They knew how completely a people is
in the power of its teachers for good or for evil,
and accordingly, with some few exceptions, applied
themselves to elevate the conceptions, the moral
tone, the feelings of their countrymen, seldom descending
to trifling disquisitions excepting for relaxation
in the intervals of more important inquiries.
The physical sciences,[807] save in the case of their
earliest cultivators, were regarded as simple handmaids
to ethics and politics. Nevertheless, in the
241study of them much earnestness was exhibited.
For, where knowledge is at all held in honour,
men will always be found sufficiently prone to the
palpable and visible. But even these pursuits assumed
a peculiar form in Greece. The genius of
the nation, essentially creative, developed its force
and its peculiar energy in framing systems of physics,
explaining the origin of the world, the birth of the
human race, its early fortunes and fabulous history.
Every great philosopher became, like an intellectual
sun, the centre of a system of physics, and his disciples
like satellites revolved around him, receiving
and reflecting his light. This, despite of some inconveniences,
was highly favourable to science. It
compelled men to the study of the philosophical
art of attack and defence. Each school became
the reviewers and critics of its rivals, sought out
their weak points, studied them profoundly, called
up all its acuteness, all its subtlety, both to assault
others and defend itself; and thus, whatever became
of the system, the professors of it carried, as
far as might be towards perfection, their intellectual
powers, invested their reasonings with every grace
of which they were susceptible, culled from the
most recondite arts and hidden resources of style
and eloquence.
But, while this golden currency was circulating
through Greece, enriching its mind and augmenting
its chances of independence and happiness, a race
of men sprang up, who brought into use a number
of ingenious and beautiful counters,—I mean the
sophists.[808] The influence of these men in the education
of the Greeks has seldom been correctly appreciated.
It has been more common to vituperate
than to study them. They corrupted, we are told,
the mind and manners of youth. But how? No
242one, as far as I know, has observed that to them
is to be traced the extinction of the republican
spirit and the opening of a way for despotism.[809]
That they created the yearning after innovation I
will not affirm; but their epoch constituted a period
of transition from republican to monarchical institutions,
and the only way in which they can be
said to have corrupted the youth was by undermining
that love of liberty and of country, the feeling
of disinterestedness on which chiefly a commonwealth
must be founded, and inculcating in lieu
thereof a system of ethics more in conformity with
the modifications of civil polity prevalent in modern
times. In this way only did they corrupt and undermine
the morals of their country. But in so
far they effected it, and that the more easily, in
that circumstances conspired, about the time they
arose, to fling the whole business of teaching into
their hands, insomuch that to be a sophist, and to
teach youth, grew to be synonymous terms.[810]
They were themselves, however, but a corruption
of what in its origin was good, and always continued
in the opinion of the undiscerning to be confounded
with the men they aped.[811] Whether we have sophists
among us at the present day, I will not determine;
243but this is the way they arose in Greece. It was
soon discovered by shrewd and calculating men, that
since philosophy excited much admiration and rendered
its teachers objects of mark and reverence, it
might by a little ingenuity be converted into a source
of profit.[812] But by what means?—The philosophers
at the outset were in possession of the popular ear,
more through the sanctity of their lives, of which all
could judge, than through their doctrines, necessarily
comprehended in their fullest extent by few. They
despaired, therefore, of the people. There existed,
however, in Greece, and will ever exist in free states,
young men of immeasurable ambition, who, impatient
of the restraint of laws, would gladly cast them off,
seize the reins of government, and become the tyrants
of their country. The mere conception of such a
design implies the possession of wealth and powerful
friends. Eager for any help they enthusiastically
welcomed all who seemed capable of promoting their
views, and when the sophists appeared, enriched with
a variety of knowledge, specious, eloquent, unscrupulous,
they eagerly threw themselves into their arms,
became their pupils, and in conjunction with them
framed the subjugation of Greece.
In tracing this class of men to their origin, we must
look back a great way, and endeavour to detect them,
under a variety of forms, different from that in which
they ultimately settled. They arose with the first
philosophers, or the first poet who made self the centre
of his researches, and sought to render the investigation
of science a means of personal aggrandisement.
Protagoras describes in Plato the rise of his own art;
where, though a side blow be wrongfully aimed at
poetry itself, the truth of the accusation against a
244number of poets cannot be denied. He makes good
at the very outset what I have asserted above. They
travelled, he says, over all Greece, alluring the noblest
youths to abandon the company of their friends and
fellow-citizens, to become their pupils, and be guided
wholly by their maxims, the nature of which I shall
presently unfold. The feelings they thus excited, he
denominates envy and malevolence, though in truth
it was nothing more than that patriotic and parental
jealousy and hatred experienced by the good when
they behold those they love led astray. The better
to escape this hostility, the ancient sophists adopted
various disguises, sometimes enveloping their art in
the folds of poetry as Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides,
on other occasions affecting to be the interpreters of
foreign rites and oracles, as Orpheus and Musæus;
while a third class concealed the features of their
art under the less suspected mask of gymnastics, such
as Iccos of Tarentum, and that Herodicos of Silymbria
a man of Megarean origin who in the art of
sophistry was second to none of his age. Occasionally
they made their entrance into cities as professors of
music. In this capacity Damon conversed with
Pericles, and Agathocles, an Athenian by birth,
diffused through the state the seeds of sophistry;
Pythocleides, too, the Coan, pursued the same course;
and thus a youth, while ostensibly engaged in gaining
a proficiency on the lyre or cithara, was initiated in
the mysteries of tyranny, irreligion and injustice.[813]
By degrees, however, it was discovered that all
disguise might be very safely laid aside.[814] In fact the
object at first aimed at,—to escape the notice of men
in power,—was found impracticable; and as to the
people, against whom all these shafts were directed, it
was easy to delude them, since what their leaders
recommended they praised. Protagoras, accordingly,
245boldly professed himself a sophist, trusting for safety
to his eloquence, and that growing laxity of manners
which was rapidly undermining the old republican
constitution and preparing the way for a new order
of things. His candour was praiseworthy, but lamentable
were the circumstances which rendered it
safe.
I would not, however, be understood to share the
opinions of those, who can discern nothing but evil
in the doctrines of the sophists. On many points
their notions harmonised altogether with those of
the wisest philosophers. Accordingly it was not precisely
what they inculcated, but the principles which
regulated their teaching, that rendered them sophists.
They taught with a view to enrich themselves, which
is wholly incompatible with a strict allegiance to truth;
since, with such views, men will always be found to
prophesy agreeably in order that they may effect their
purpose.
This circumstance has not been sufficiently considered
by the writers who undertake their apology.
They compare them with the literary men of modern
times, and imagine this comparison a defence. But
does it not rather substantiate the accusation? It is
true that, like modern literary men, they haunted the
houses of the great, whom they regarded as their
patrons; that to them, rather than to the people, they
looked for support; that, like them, they worshipped
wealth and abhorred poverty; that their studies, their
discourses, their writings, diffused far and wide through
society a taste for arts and elegance; that they furnished
the public in their declamations, satires, novels,
of which they were the inventors, with inexhaustible
sources of amusement:—but what virtue did they inculcate?
On whom did they urge the necessity of
sacrificing private to public good? On what occasion
did they dare to stem the torrent of immorality, of
impiety, of unpatriotic maxims, which the base and
the selfish were pouring forth against the old bulwarks
of freedom? That among them there were men of a
246very high order of genius, it is impossible to deny.
Gorgias of Leontium, from whose name we have borrowed
an epithet to express whatever is most glorious
in nature or dazzling and elaborate in art, Protagoras,
Prodicos, Hippias of Elis, Polos of Agrigentum, Thrasymachos
of Chalcedon, have left behind them an imperishable
memory;[815] but so have Busiris and Phalaris
and Catiline. They are remembered for the
good they might have done, and the evil they did.
Since, however, the sophists acted so important a
part in the education of the Greeks, the space I devote
to them is clearly their due: it is necessary to the
thorough comprehension of the subject. Almost from
the moment they arose they aimed at a monopoly of
the art of teaching, and the father of the art, properly
so called, was Gorgias. Few names of antiquity, as Geel[816]
has well observed, are better known or more celebrated
than that of this distinguished sophist, among the
causes of whose amazing popularity must be reckoned
the number of great men whom he instructed in eloquence,
and the splendid vices of style which his example
and precept brought into vogue. The exact
date of his birth is not known:[817] he is, however, supposed
to have been born at Leontium in Sicily, about
the seventy-third Olympiad. His father’s name was
Charmantes.[818] Nearly all the particulars of his early
life are unknown, the ancients having been as much
247too negligent as we are too lavish of biographical
details. Under whom he studied, with whom he conversed,
how much he owed to others, and how much
to his own genius and industry, are points not easy to
be determined, though we cannot adopt the opinion of
Ælian,[819] who sends him to school to Philolaos; or of
Diogenes Laertius, who will have Empedocles to have
been his teacher, since the latter was very little older
than himself, and the former much younger. Empedocles
is indeed said to have invented the art of rhetoric,
in which case we might suppose Gorgias to have
been his scholar. But how invented? He may have
been the first who sought to reduce it into an art, or
who so called it; but as Aristotle observes, every man
who reasons persuasively is a rhetorician, whether his
eloquence be based on the formal study of the art or
not. In philosophy, indeed, he would seem[820] to have
been the disciple of Empedocles; but in rhetoric they
both very probably derived instruction from Corax and
Tisias, who flourished and taught rhetoric in Sicily
about the period of their youth.[821]
These, however, are mere conjectures. He would
probably have died in obscurity, and been forgotten
with the kings who reigned ante Agamemnona, had not
the misfortunes of his country brought him, in old age,
to the great workshop of Fame. The immediate occasion
was this; the people of Leontium having engaged
and been worsted in war by the Syracusans,
sent ambassadors to demand succour of the Athenian
people, and among these the principal speaker was
Gorgias. Practised in a style of oratory new at
Athens, indulging in a profusion of metaphors and
other figures bordering on the licences of poetry, he
immediately hurried away captive his hearers, fulfilled
248the desires of his fellow citizens, and established for
himself a reputation[822] where all men most desired to
possess one. To augment his glory it has not been
unusual to enumerate Pericles and Thucydides among
those who became his scholars. But this embassy
took place in the fifth year of the Peloponnesian war
when Pericles had been dead two years. That Thucydides
heard him, however, is not at all improbable,
since his exile did not take place[823] till the eighth year
of the war. Among his admirers are mentioned two
other men, whose principles and history afford the best
illustration of what fruit the teaching of the sophists
was likely to produce,—Critias and Alcibiades, whose
ability, courage, and profligacy rendered them the
scourges of their country. It has been with great
probability supposed that, having on his return to Leontium
rendered an account of his mission, he quitted
Sicily for ever, for the purpose of becoming a professor
of eloquence in Greece. This is Diodorus’s account,
but the Scholiast on Hermogenes supposes him to have
remained at Athens. Whether this was the case or
not, he soon considered one city, however great or
celebrated, too confined a theatre for the display of
his merit. He, therefore, adopted the profession of an
itinerant lecturer, with the double view of gratifying
his vanity and filling his purse. And he thoroughly
understood the art of dazzling mankind, for, not supposing
it enough to unfold before his auditors his magazines
of tropes and figures, stored up, like theatrical
thunder and lightning, to be introduced at the proper
moment, he had recourse to other dramatic arts for
producing effect, appearing in magnificent attire, flowing
purple robes, embroidered sandals, his fingers sparkling
with gold and gems. But though the oldest of
the sophists, he was not the first who adopted this
course. Protagoras, and perhaps others, had previously
commenced their peregrinations, and begun to practise
249on the credulity and weakness of the multitude.
Among the Athenians they were paid chiefly with
praise; “the solid pudding” was to be sought elsewhere.
And accordingly we find, as Plato sarcastically
expresses it, that upon the advent of the sophists,
the Thessalians, usually celebrated for their full purses
and fine horses,[824] grew all at once remarkable for their
love of wisdom, that is, paid the sophists handsomely,
in the hope of thus enticing knowledge to remain
among them. In fact they supposed that wisdom is
like a candle and lantern, by which you may have
light,—or a saint’s shirt, by wearing which you infallibly
become holy,—or the lamp of Epictetus, which a
rich man bought at three thousand drachmas, in the
hope that it would light him into the very adyta of philosophy.
However this may be, it is very certain that
the Thessalians became the patrons of the sophists, who
disposed in that country of more wisdom and eloquence
than in any other part of Greece, and the principal
purchasers of it were of the rich family of the Aleuadæ,
the earliest Mæcenases, I believe, on record.
But the sophists, to their credit be it acknowledged,
were no misers. What they easily gained they spent
freely; and not merely so, but in many instances converted
the effects of their personal vanity into public
ornaments of the whole country. Thus Gorgias, enriched
by the spoils of Thessaly, erected at Delphi a
golden statue[825] of himself, which argued a more generous
spirit than he would have shown by setting it
afloat in the channels of trade or husbandry or usury,
in the hope of rendering himself a great capitalist.
Gorgias was long absent from Athens, and visited
during his travels the most considerable cities of
Greece. Among other places he came to Delphi,
where from the steps of the altar, probably during
the games, he delivered that oration called the Pythian,
in celebration of which he erected the above-mentioned
statue.[826] From thence perhaps,—for the
250chronology of his journey is not exactly known,—he
proceeded to Olympia, where he also assisted at the
games for the purpose of exhibiting his oratorical
talents in the presence of all Greece, and reaping
as it were in an hour a harvest of glory. This declamation,
delivered during the Peloponnesian war,
had at least the recommendation of being patriotic.
Standing in front of the temple of Zeus, the god
of concord and of peace, he earnestly recommended
union and harmony.[827] If war they must have, there
were the barbarians,—let their arms be turned against
them. With what success he spoke, history has informed
us; but the satirists of antiquity, ever naturally
addicted to scandal, are careful to remark
that this great advocate of concord and unanimity
kept up a civil war in his own house, where the
charms of some beautiful-cheeked θεραπαινίδιον[828] excited
the jealousy of Madame. At the same time
the old gentleman, to adopt the most moderate computation,
must have been hard upon three-score and
ten, though some would make him eighty.
Over the latter days of Gorgias[829] hovers the same
251darkness which conceals from view the commencement.
It is known with no degree of certainty
where he spent the close of his long life or where
he died, though as no account exists of his return
to Sicily, it probably was in Greece.
Next to Gorgias in reputation was Protagoras,
whose history is still less known. In the opinion
of some writers he was the oldest of the sophists.
Though the date of his birth be later than that
of Gorgias, he preceded him in the profession of
the art. He was certainly, I think, born much earlier
than is supposed either by Clinton or by Geel,
who take him to have been almost exactly of Socrates’
age, that is to have come into the world
about 479 B. C. But in this opinion I cannot concur.
It is in direct contradiction with a passage in Plato[830]
who, however careless in matters of chronology, would,
I am persuaded, never push his negligence so far as to
make one man say to another, born in the same year
with himself, that he was old enough to be his father.
To me, therefore it appears necessary that
we throw back ten or twelve years the date of his
birth. He was ten years, it is admitted, older
than Democritos. The latter, who had made considerable
progress in philosophy when he saw Protagoras
in the capacity of a wood-carrier and undertook
to initiate him in his system, could hardly
have been less than seven or eight and twenty, so
that the former was little short of forty. He exercised
the profession of sophist during forty years,
252and died about 406 B. C. He must therefore have
been born about 484–485 B. C.[831]
But I cannot here pursue the history of the sophists,
which no further belongs to my work than
as it is connected with the subject of education.
On their writings, however, and manner of teaching
it is necessary that I should be more explicit. Whether
Gorgias first published or Protagoras is of little
moment; both evidently wrote with the same aim,
which was to confound truth and error, right and
wrong, not perhaps through any enmity to truth or
to virtue, but from the sheer vanity of being thought
capable of any thing, and the desire of converting
their talents to account. One distinguishing quality
of the class was fertility. They piqued themselves
on being able to pour forth volume after volume,
treatise after treatise, speech after speech. This, indeed,
it was that constituted their principal claim
to superiority over the philosophers, a pains-taking
race, among whom the period of intellectual gestation
was longer than that of the elephant; whereas
your true sophist, without meditation, study or experience,
astonished his admirers by the copiousness
of his invention, by imagery, gorgeous and glittering,
generally stolen from the poets, and by a piquant
air of profoundness and originality, which the art of
253seeming to doubt all that other men believe never
fails to confer.
Besides, comprehending enough of human nature
to know that whoever amuses is listened to, whatever
atrocities he may utter, they were careful to
invest their doctrine with a light and graceful exterior.
No man ever excelled them at a joke. They
in fact managed matters so that in their hands every
thing became a joke, and to overthrow an antagonist
demanded nothing more than to be able to raise a
laugh at his expense; for, all the world over, in
the opinion of the vulgar, whoever is ridiculous is
wrong. From calculation, they eschewed the uphill
task of correcting error, or advancing truth, or reforming
manners. To upbraid men for their faults
and counsel amendment, is to incur their enmity.
Reformers, prophets, apostles of truth have always
been persecuted, often put to death. The sophists
felt no ambition to be martyrs. Poverty, too, and
obscurity, spare diet, a coarse mantle, and the
solitude in which the poor great man walks the
world, they could not away with. To their happiness
crowds of admirers, opulence, costly robes[832]
and all the refinements of luxury formed a sine
quâ non; and accordingly in the choice of their
doctrines they were guided by one consideration
only, viz. how they might amuse mankind, and
reap all the advantages of popularity.
The eloquence which statesmen employed to recommend
their measures, the sophists applied to fictitious
uses, imagining themselves in impossible circumstances,
reversing times, confounding manners, and
254attacking or defending men long since dead. In all
such cases the interest would chiefly depend on the
novelty or ingenuity of the thoughts and the subtle
artifices of style. Hence the extravagance, the coldness,
the perversion of imagery, the distortion and
monkey tricks of language, for which their manner
of compositions became remarkable. The false position
they took up led, in philosophy, to results equally
disastrous. To aim at truth, would have been to
throw themselves into the wake of the philosophers,
to share, without worldly compensation, their dangers,
labours, and comparative insignificance. They struck
out, therefore, a new course for themselves. Taking
philosophy as it was, they undertook to dispute on all
and every part of it; to show that for a skilful dialectician
there was no proposition that might not
with nearly equal facility be attacked or defended;
that by means of syllogisms or enthymemes, artfully
arranged, darkness may be proved to be light, and
light darkness; that between lying and speaking the
truth there is no difference; that in fact both veracity
and falsehood are nonentities, all our notions being
mere arbitrary fictions; and that to beat your dog
and to beat your father is the same thing.
Of this novel and ingenious style of argumentation,[833]
in which Hudibras was an adept, we are furnished
with abundant examples by Plato, more especially in the
Euthydemus, where two old fellows, with arguments
longer than their beards, luxuriate in the felicitous
inventions by which, like another Circe, they are
enabled to transform their hearers into hogs and bulldogs.
In humorous extravagance the dialogue scarcely
falls short of an Aristophanic comedy or a Christmas
pantomime. Socrates[834] plays the Clown, Ctesippos
the Harlequin, and the blows dealt upon the magicians
in the course of the piece, are such as, were they fully
255comprehended, would set all Drury Lane or Covent
Garden in a roar. But the length of the scenes prevents
their transplantation into my pages, and the
abridgment of a joke is a very dull thing. Let
us, however, hear by what logic they proved Socrates
to have been a second “man without a navel.”
“Answer me,” cried Dionysidoros.
“Well then,” replied Socrates, “I answer that
Iolaus was the nephew of Heracles, and, as far as I
can see, no nephew of mine. For my brother Patrocles
was not his father, but quite another guess sort of
person, Iphicles the brother of Heracles.”
“And Patrocles was your brother?”
“By the mother, not by the father.”
“Then he was your brother, and not your brother?”
“By the father’s side he was not,” answered Socrates,
“since he was the son of Charidemos, and I of Sophroniscos.”
“But Sophroniscos, no less than Charidemos, was
a father.”
“Exactly; the former was my father, the latter
Patrocles’.”
“Then was Charidemos other than a father?”
“He was other than mine.”
“Then he was a father, and not a father? But,
come, are you the same thing as a stone?”
“I fear,” replied Socrates, “I shall appear to be no
better in your hands, though I do not discover the
identity.”
“Well, being other than a stone, you are not a
stone; being other than gold, you are not gold. And
must not the same thing happen to Charidemos?
Being something else than a father, he is not a father.”
“So it seems,” replied the philosopher.
“And what is true of Charidemos,” replied the
younger sophist, “must be true of Sophroniscos.
Being other than a father, he is not a father: from
which, my good friend, it follows that you never had
any father at all![835]”
256Socrates being thus placed on a level with the first
man, his friend Ctesippos took up the ball, and sent it
with so much force into the face of the sophists, that
it somewhat startled them.
“Come, then,” said he, “is not your own father in
precisely the same circumstances? Is he not different
from my father?”
“Not at all,” answered Euthydemos.
“What, then, he is the same?”
“Exactly.”
“I should be sorry to think so. However, is he my
father only, or is he everybody else’s father?”
“Everybody’s, of course; for can you imagine him
to be a father, and not a father?”
“I should have thought so,” answered Ctesippos.
“What! that gold is not gold, and that a man is
not a man?”
“Not so, friend Euthydemos; but you do not, as
the saying is, mingle flax with flax; and your assertion,
that your father is the father of all men, seems
very extraordinary.”
“But he is, though.”
“Very good; but is he not only the father of
men but of horses and every other animal?”
“Of everything!”
“And your mother, in like manner, is the mother
of all things?”
“Certainly.”
“Then she is the mother of the sea-hedgehog.”
“And so is yours!”
“And you are the full brother of gudgeons, cubs,
and sucking-pigs.”
“So are you!”
“And your father is a dog.”
“And yours, too!”
It was now evident they were in anger, and accordingly
Dionysidoros interposed, and observed jocularly,—
“Provided you will answer me, Ctesippos, I undertake
to make you confess that your father is just
257what my brother has said. So, tell me, have you
a dog?”
“I have, and a snappish cur he is, too.”
“And has he young ones?”
“Ay, and they are more snappish than himself.”
“Well, now, is not the dog their father?”
“No doubt.”
“And the dog is yours?”
“Certainly.”
“It follows then, if he be a father and yours, that
he must be your father; so that his cubs are your
brothers.”
Before the young man could reply to this compliment
the sophist proceeded:
“Answer me, Ctesippos, a little longer. Do you
ever beat that dog?”
“That I do,” replied Ctesippos laughing; “and I
wish I could administer the same discipline to you
in your turn.”
“Then you beat your own father!”
“The beating,” answered the young man, “would
be more justly inflicted on yours, for having knowingly
let loose two such sages upon mankind!”[836]
But these, after all, were but laughing sophists, who,
though they had succeeded in confounding and obliterating
from their own minds every trace of difference
between right and wrong, fell short of that superb
degree of wickedness at which Polos, Callicles, and
Thrasymachos arrived, at least in speculation. The
former were mere babblers, who corrupted a pupil or
two whom bad luck threw in their way. Thrasymachos
flew at higher game. His sophistry was political,[837]
258and his aim the destruction of freedom, by extinguishing
that sense of justice on which it must ever
be based. The genius of the man was considerable.
He had deep thoughts, and investigated boldly; but
his sympathies having somehow been early perverted,
he grew sombre, fierce, and unsociable, and without the
slightest disguise advocated, like our Hobbes,[838] tyrannical
maxims and morals. Money, like the rest, he
of course worshipped. Nay, in the conversation at
the house of Cephalos he even ventures to sneer rudely
at Socrates’ poverty; upon which Glaucon[839] observes:—"Don’t
fear to go unpaid for the instruction you
may give him, for we will enter into a subscription on
his behalf."[840] Thrasymachos, however, was still more
259vain than avaricious. He thirsted to exhibit his notions
in order to enjoy the satisfaction arising from
shocking those who heard him. He maintained that
justice is nothing more than what in any state the
rulers think proper to establish; and that, consequently,
the ordinances of a tyrant are as binding and as just
as the laws of a free state, since by nature all actions
are indifferent.
It was, in fact, a part of the sophistical doctrine, to
maintain in politics, what Hobbes afterwards advocated,
the right of the stronger:—
—--"The good old rule, the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can."
But because there is in every man’s heart a rooted
prejudice in favour of justice, they were fain to argue
that all governors, in as far as they deserved the name,
would ordain what was best for themselves, and that,
whatever it might be, was just:[841] a very satisfactory
doctrine, which has never grown wholly out of
fashion. They laughed to scorn, as persons who required
nurses to look after them and wipe their noses,[842]
whomsoever they found entertaining the notion that
governments were instituted for the good of the
governed.
Their staple comparison was always a flock or a
herd. What shepherd, they inquired, ever looked
after his flock for their benefit, and not for his own
use? In like manner magistrates, who, as is proper,
hold the chief place in cities, look on the public
exactly as if they are so many sheep or oxen, and
think of nothing, night or day, but how they may derive
most advantage from them. Justice, therefore,
260is what promotes the interests of the governors,
though it may be loss to the governed. The man,
esteemed just and pious and holy by the philosopher,
was merely, in their opinion, a fool. Whenever anything
is to be gained he gets less than any man, and
when anything is to be done for the community he
does more. He is always ready with his purse whenever
anything is to be paid; always out of the way
when gain is afloat. The unjust man, on the contrary,
knows what he is about. He pays and does as
little as possible for the public, and takes from it all
he can. The former renders himself disagreeable to
his friends and domestics, by refusing to commit any
unjust action on their behalf. The latter, on the other
hand, unscrupulous in acquisition, is able to oblige
many by his wealth if he happens to require their
services. Thus even in private life and small matters
injustice is to be preferred; but when it operates on
a grand scale, plunders whole cities, and usurps over
them supreme authority, it reaches the acme of felicity,
is saluted by the name of prince, and becomes
an object of envy to all mankind.
Nor did they pause even here. It was not enough
to show the happiness of vice as vice; they undertook
to prove that vice is virtue and virtue vice, which may
be considered as their magnum opus. They went to
work boldly, but, like the fox of Archilochos,[843] always
kept something of their figure concealed, that, if any
necessity arose, they might be able to retreat by
treating their whole chain of argumentation as a mere
rhetorical exercise. “You appear to be in earnest,”
observed Socrates on one occasion. “What does it
signify to you whether I am in earnest or not,” replied
the sophist, “if you cannot refute what I advance?”
With this prudent reserve, they taught that
injustice is a powerful and beautiful principle, reckoning
it among the virtues, and attributing to it all the
characteristics usually attributed to justice.[844] Pascal,
261in developing the morals of the Jesuits, describes their
principles exactly. They patronised even cutting
purses, providing the operator had the ingenuity to
conceal his performance. No doubt, in thus arguing,
they did violence to their secret convictions, and might,
by an able dialectician, be made to feel, though never
to acknowledge, the deformity of their doctrines, as
Thrasymachos, driven up in a corner by the logic
of Socrates, blushes and is chap-fallen;[845] but as sophistry
was their occupation, the misery and degradation
was, that, convinced or not convinced, they
must still sing the old song. It is evident, in fact,
that, like many sophists of other days, they were bold
with the lips while the heart within trembled. The
light of conscience could not be wholly quenched.
They conceived the gods to be armed with power and
disposed to exert it, not only against evil doers but
against evil speakers also. Pressed upon this point, whether
the bad be not obnoxious and the good agreeable
to the deities, Thrasymachos would not deny it. And
why? Lest he should render himself hateful to them,
ἴνα μὴ τοῖς δὲ ἀπέχθωμαι. So that in the worst times
of paganism, religion, how corrupt soever, failed not
to preserve some influence over men’s minds, to save
them from the bestial recklessness into which they
seemed desirous to plunge.[846]
Nevertheless, the sophists on many points did but
methodise, condense and embody in florid language
the maxims and modes of thinking current in corrupt
ages among the vulgar. Their doctrines were
but an echo of what was heard in the ecclesiæ, in
the law courts, in the theatres, and in the camps.
It would have been to little purpose, therefore, to
have silenced them, unless, at the same time, the
above schools could have been purified, wherein
young and old, men and women, imbibed the opinions,
maxims, prejudices, which constituted the
262system of the sophists.[847] And Plato, who observes
this, supplies us, in doing so, with a fresh proof that
women frequented the theatre. In one of these
four places, he says, they were corrupted: but they
were not soldiers, and, therefore, not in the camp;
they were not dicasts, and, therefore, not in the
law courts; they were neither orators nor voters,
and, therefore, not in the ecclesiæ. The evil doctrines
they imbibed, therefore, must have been
imbibed at the theatre.[848] Here, too, the youth, disciplined
and principled in better things by his philosophical
teachers, received a new education which
overthrew the former. Deeds and words, condemned
by his teachers, he often found to be greeted here
with rapturous applause, re-echoed by rocks and
walls; while hisses, sneers, or vociferous vituperation
would, perhaps, be showered on things he had
been taught most to revere. In his feelings, therefore,
and internal convictions a revolution was soon
effected. He grew ashamed of the notions implanted
in him at school. Every lingering sentiment of
honour seemed to him an unfortunate prejudice
despised by men of the world, and he hastened
to shift his notions as a clown does his dress to
prepare for admittance into fashionable company.
The sophists, skilled in the study of mankind, soon
discovered, that to please and ultimately to rule the
ignorant, it was necessary to humour their failings,
and, in appearance at least, to adopt their opinions.
In a commonwealth, governed by wholesome principles,
great men obtain influence, not by resembling
the majority but by differing from them. They are
popular by the authority of their virtues. They are
reverenced with the reverence due to a father from
his child, who confides in him from long experience
in his love and implicit faith in his honour, and will
submit to be rebuked and chastised, and determined
263by him in his actions from the conviction that his
superior wisdom and probity and affection entitle
him to rule. But the sophists, and their political
disciples, despaired of thus governing the people.
In their manners there was none of the dignity, in
their minds none of the wisdom, in their resolutions
none of that inflexible firmness arising from consciousness
of right, which neither threats nor clamour
can subdue. They regarded the populace as a huge
beast, whose ways and temper they must study, whose
passions and desires they must know how to raise and
how to satisfy; by what arts they might safely enter his
den, stroke his terrible paws, or mount, if they thought
proper, on his back and direct his irresistible might
against their enemies. And this they esteemed as
wisdom, and upon those who excelled in it they bestowed
the name of statesmen and philosophers.[849]
Among the arts by which this influence was acquired
were flattery and boasting; by the former
they disposed people to listen, by the latter they
sought to justify them for listening, by dwelling on
the wonders they could perform. If they might be
believed, they could convert fools into wise men,
which philosophers regarded in the light of a miracle.
This disposition τὸ θρασὺ καὶ τὸ ἰταμὸν,[850] as Basilius
expresses it, is admirably painted by Plato in the
character of Thrasymachos. And the contrast afforded
by Socrates makes good, as Muretus observes, the
wise remark of Thucydides ὅτιὅτι ἀμαθία μὲν θάρσος, φρόνησις
δ᾽ ὄκνον φέρει.
Such, however, as they were, the reputation of
the sophists spread far and wide. Even among the
barbarians of Asia a desire was felt to have the
ear tickled by their eloquence, as we may gather
from the letter of Amytocrates, an Indian king, to
Antiochos, requesting him to ship off for India as
soon as possible, some boiled wine, dried figs, and
264a sophist, observing that he would very willingly
pay the price of him. But Antiochos, either loth
to part with so useful a servant of the monarchy,
or out of pity for the Indians, whom he suspected
to be already sufficiently tormented, replied, that as
for boiled wine and figs he might be supplied to
his heart’s content, but that with respect to sophists
the law prohibited their exportation.[851] He had all
the while, however, without knowing it, abundant
specimens of the race in his own realms, where the
Brahmins have, time out of mind, cultivated and
thriven by the same arts, and maintained the same
opinions, as conferred celebrity on the followers of
Gorgias and Protagoras. Their practices, indeed, as
well as those of the Yoghis, are in India modified
by the state of society and public opinion. The
wonder which among the Greeks was excited by
the advocacy of monstrous doctrines, on the banks
of the Ganges, arises out of physical pranks. The
Greek sophist tortured his mind, the Indian tortures
his body for the edification of the public, but
the result is the same; the practitioners thus contrive
to subsist in idleness on the earnings of the
industrious and credulous.
265
A different picture is presented to us by the
education of the Spartans,[852] which, almost perfect in
its kind, aimed chiefly at unfolding the powers of
the body. Mental acquirements in the states of
Doric origin were few, and the object even of these
seems to have been rather connected with the developement
of the animal than the spiritual nature
of man, though they were not utterly destitute of
all those arts and accomplishments which embellish
a life of peace. Little stress, however, can be laid
on the elaborate divisions of youth into numerous
classes, the intention of which is not stated. There
can, nevertheless, be no doubt that much art, reflection
and wisdom was exhibited in the forming
of the system whose object was the creation of a
military character, and through this the enjoyment
of the hegemonia or lead in the public affairs of
Greece, an honour which Sparta attained to and
held during many years.[853]
266A modern writer has correctly remarked that
by permitting the state to decide on the lives of
infants, the institutions of Lycurgus recognised the
authority of the community to regulate, how it
pleased, the education they were to receive. The
authority of parents over their children was thus
all but annihilated, for, although the recognition
and feeling of relationship continued after the state
had undertaken the training of youth, their influence
was exceedingly weakened, a circumstance to
which may be attributed the seeming heroism of
the Spartan women, who could stoically bear the
death of their sons because they had been in a
great measure estranged from them.
As, however, the institutions of Lycurgus differed
in all things else from those of other Grecian legislators,
it is not surprising they should also differ on
the subject of education. But it may greatly be
doubted whether we altogether comprehend his system.
The accounts transmitted to us are in many
points contradictory, and it may in general be remarked
that on no subject whatever do modern ideas differ
so much from those prevalent in antiquity, as on the
subject of education. Plutarch and Xenophon, or
rather the sophist who assumed his name, two of the
authors on whom in this discussion most reliance is
usually placed, were prejudiced and credulous, and
often, to speak frankly, extremely ignorant. Both
were unwilling, even if they possessed the power, to
criticise the system, and yet by modern writers their
opinions have generally without scruple been adopted.
Xenophon himself, as well as the sophist who here
apes him, was in predilections a Spartan, and as
strongly disposed to satirise and underrate the institutions
of his own country as to exaggerate the
merits of the Laconian. Even were the trifling
essay on the Lacedæmonian republic proved to be
his, we should yet lay little stress upon its testimony,
unless when corroborated by the evidence of
other and better writers.
Elsewhere in Greece,—observes the author of this
267tract,[854] whoever he was,—persons, the most solicitous
respecting the education of their children, placed
over them at the first dawn of intellectual developement,
pædagogues, who at the outset undertook their
instruction, and afterwards conducted them to the
schools where letters, music, and gymnastics were
taught. In this respect, however, as a modern writer
has shown, the institutions of Sparta were in no
degree superior, since Helots were there the instructors
of young children; and, on this account,
he rejects the story of Plutarch,[855] that they were
compelled to intoxicate themselves, to exhibit to the
youths a practical proof of the deformity of drunkenness.[856]
It was contrary, he says, to common sense.
But as common sense had very little to do with
any part of the system, this is a poor argument,
and will not weigh against positive testimony.
Another evil which the Pseudo-Xenophon discovers
in the common Hellenic plan of training,[857]
was that lads were indulged with the use of shoes,
and rendered effeminate by frequent changes of clean
linen, while their appetite, generally keen in boyhood,[858]
was suffered to be the measure of what they
ate. Lycurgus, he remarks, managed all these
things differently. Instead of remaining under the
superintendence of their parents, and frequenting
what schools and masters they might judge proper,
boys at Sparta passed under a sort of camp discipline
regulated by the laws and intrusted to the
guardianship of a particular magistrate, whom they
268denominated a Pædonomos. This part of the system
Xenophon[859] prefers to the Athenian practice of intrusting
youth to the care of servile pædagogues.
The Pædonomos, however, resembled in many respects
the Athenian Gymnasiarch, and, so far as I
can perceive, possessed no superiority over him, except
that his authority extended beyond school hours.
He was, indeed, a kind of despot, vested with the
power to call the boys together when he pleased,
and inflict chastisement, at his own discretion, on any
whom he detected exhibiting the least symptom of
effeminacy. To enable him to carry his resolutions
instantly into effect he marched about the town like
an executioner, attended by men having whips, who
at his nod seized the boy delinquent and subjected
him at once to the torture. Thus possessing the
power of enforcing obedience, a great show at least
of reverence attended him.
The privilege of sharing the paternal cares of the
Pædonomos was not rigidly confined to the sons of Spartans
(πολιτικοὶ παῖδες);[860] the Mothaces also, Spartans of
half blood, and even strangers might share it. Who
the Mothaces were it is extremely difficult to determine.
Some contend that they were slaves brought
up in the family.[861] But Athenæus, and Phylarchos
whom he quotes, state most distinctly that they were
free, ἐλεύθεροι μέν εἰσί. In order to remove the unfavourable
impression made on mankind by the accounts transmitted
to us of Spartan slavery, it has been pretended
that they, as well as the Neodamodes, were Helots. Of
the Neodamodes, however, the very author on whom
reliance is placed asserts the contrary. They were originally
slaves indeed, he says, but different from the
Helots, ἑτέρους ὄντας τῶν εἱλώτων. With respect to the
Mothaces,[862] notwithstanding the testimony of Hesychius
and other grammarians, it seems clear that they were
the sons of free though poor Laconians, who, desirous
269of obtaining for them the rights of Spartans, sent
them to be the companions of such youthful citizens
as would consent to receive them. It is moreover added
that the youth, according to their means, chose one,
two, or more of these companions; which shows that
although the right of controlling the studies of its children
was vested in the state, the expenses, in whole or
in part, devolved upon the parents.
The Mothaces, or Mothones as they are sometimes
called, were identical with the σύντροφοι:[863] but the
τρόφιμοι were such youthful strangers—for example,
the sons of Xenophon[864] and Phocion—as, by submitting
to the severities of Spartan discipline, acquired
the freedom of the city, the privilege of aspiring to
political distinction, and, according to some writers,
even a share of the land. This, if true, would render
credible the statement of the philosopher Teles,[865] who
affirms that even Helots, by the means above described,
could rise to the rank of Spartans; while they who
in this point disobeyed the laws, were they even the
children of kings, sank to the condition of Helots, and
of course forfeited their estates, otherwise there would
have been no land to bestow on the military neophytes.
Three of the most remarkable men in Spartan story,
Lysander, Gylippos, and Callicratidas were Mothaces,
whose fathers were obscure.[866] It will be seen that
we have here the original of that system of education
sketched by Xenophon in his Persian Utopia, and
designed to recommend monarchy to his countrymen,
as that of Sir Thomas More was framed for the contrary
purpose.
According to the laws of Lycurgus the heir-apparent
270to the throne was exempted from the necessity of
mixing with his fellow-citizens in the public schools,
though the younger members of the royal family occupied
the same level with other boys.[867] That this was
an unwise regulation, however, will be at once evident,
since no man stands so much in need of severe discipline
as a prince, who in spite of correction is too apt
to be guided by his unbridled passions. Fact, too,
bears out this view, for two of the noblest sovereigns
of Sparta, Leonidas and Agesilaos, had been subjected,
while boys,[868] to the correction of their teachers.
It has been already remarked that the spirit of
Spartan education was severe. It was, in fact, precisely
the same as that which, in the last generation,
pervaded the discipline of the Seneka and Mohawk
Indians, and produced those numerous examples of
patience, fortitude, and magnanimity, together with
that force, agility and suppleness of body so greatly
admired and, perhaps, envied by civilised nations.
It was this stern and martial system that constituted
the secret model, according to which Locke fashioned
his plan of youthful training, designed rather to
produce a sound mind in a sound body than to
shatter and enervate the latter by the piling up in
the brain of miscellaneous and often useless knowledge.
But in his attempts at hardening the frame
and rendering it invulnerable to the stings of suffering,
our countryman did not dare to go the lengths
of the Spartan legislator, who in this, at least, exhibited
superior wisdom, that he did not consider the
chastisement of stripes to have any tendency towards
creating a base and servile habit of mind.[869]
Consistently with the general aim of his institutions,
Lycurgus, instead of ordaining, like Locke,
that his alumni should wear leaky shoes, dispensed
with the incumbrance altogether. And, certainly,
271in a soldier, the habit of trampling with the naked
foot on ice and snow and the sharpest rocks, is
worthy of acquisition.
Institutions are generally based on the actual circumstances
of society. Lycurgus legislated for a
people to whom it was important to be able easily
to climb steeps, or descend them with a sure foot,
to spring forward also, to run, to bend, and perform
innumerable acts of personal dexterity. He, therefore,
commenced with boyhood the inculcating of those
habits and exercises which their manhood would imperatively
require of them.
It has been seen that for change of linen an
especial aversion was entertained at Sparta. Children
were, therefore, taught to be content with one
clean shirt per annum, at the termination of which period
it was probably as well peopled as the Emperor
Julian’s beard, particularly as, during all that time,
it was considered low and unfashionable to bathe or
make use of the ordinary ointments, an indulgence
permitted to them but for a few days in the course
of the year. All this time, however, they might
more properly, perhaps, be said to be shirtless, since
the himation only was left them, the chiton being
taken away.[870] They were compelled also, as incipient
soldiers, to lie hard on pallet beds, made with the
tops of reeds collected, perfunctorily, without the help
of the knife or dagger, from the banks of the Eurotas.
To this, as an especial indulgence, they were in winter
permitted to add a quantity of thistle-down, which
material was supposed to contain much warmth.[871]
The initiation into these accomplishments commenced
at the age of twelve. At the same time,
acting upon the Galenian maxim, that “a fat stomach
makes a lean wit,” the boys were reduced to
short commons, the Bouagor, or leader of the juvenile
troop, being instructed to pinch them as closely
272as possible on that score, in order that when the
chances of war should reduce them to the necessity
of subsisting on famine rations, they might be prepared
without murmuring to submit to it. Persons
so educated, moreover, would be little delicate in
the choice of provisions. Anything, from a sea
hedgehog to a snail, would suit their stomachs; and
it would be hard indeed if war could ever place
them in circumstances where such food as they were
accustomed to might not be found. Health, too,
and light spirits, as Lycurgus well understood, are
the offspring of an abstemious diet. The spare warrior,
clean-limbed and agile, would leap round the
man puffed out and bloated with overfeeding, and,
therefore, to be fat was at Sparta an offence punishable
at law.[872] However, not to be too hard on the
young gentlemen, it was always permitted, when
hunger grew troublesome, to have recourse to what,
for want of a fitter name, we must call stealing.[873]
In modern times it would be thought a poor compliment
to any system of education to represent
273it as an admirable method for rendering a man an
accomplished thief. But the Spartan sophists, whose
wisdom Plato, in a jocular mood, so greatly extols,
held a different theory. They did not undertake the
teaching of morals, but such habits as became a
soldier, among which thieving always maintains a
distinguished place. Xenophon, however, is careful
to guard us against the supposition that this habit
of appropriation arose from want. The object of the
legislator was, without the incurring of moral guilt,
to nourish all the useful habits commonly found in
a thief,—as, the power to watch by night, to wear
the mask of honesty by day, craftily to lay snares,
and even to set spies upon the individual to be
plundered. To men designed to spend their lives
in war such qualities are, doubtless, of the highest
importance, since they enable them to procure provisions
and overreach the enemy.[874] To this practice
Xenophon alludes in the Anabasis, where the army
is placed in circumstances of much difficulty. “I
understand,” he says to Cheirisophos, “that among
you Lacedæmonians the habit of stealing is carefully
cultivated from childhood; and that, so far from
being disgraceful, it is considered a necessary
accomplishment, so long as you keep within the
bounds prescribed by law. When detected, however,
it is equally lawful to be scourged.”[875]
Were they scourged, then, for stealing? Not at
all, but simply for being caught; and Xenophon is
right in remarking, that, in all human arts, they who
unskilfully perform what they undertake are punished,
and so should a bungling thief.[876] The passage
immediately following is mutilated or inextricably
corrupt,[877] but, from an attentive examination,
it would appear that the boys detected on these
occasions were selected to be flogged[878] during the
274festival of Artemis Orthia, or Orthosia, whose altar
was thus annually smeared with human blood. This
impartial superstition extended its empire over all
ranks and conditions of men, servile or free, from
the beggar to the prince; for here, we are told,
Helots had sometimes the honour to be scourged
in company perhaps with a scion of the Eurypontid or
Agid kings. At Alea, in Arcadia, women, by the
command of an oracle, were subjected to the same
discipline. “Here,” says Pausanias,[879] “during the festival
of Dionysos women, by command of an oracle,
were flogged like the youth of Sparta at the altar
of Artemis Orthia.”
The above ordinance of Lycurgus led in the next
instance to the hybernation of the youth upon the
mountains:[880] to inure them still further to hardships,
and, practically to teach them the art of providing
for themselves, they were sent forth with a roving
commission to prowl about the highlands and less
frequented parts of Laconia, armed for self-protection,
and that they might be able to bring down their
game. At first, perhaps, they confined themselves
within the limits prescribed by law. But almost
of necessity they would become involved in quarrels
with the Helots, by plundering whose farms and villages
they chiefly subsisted. The Helots would sometimes
resist and sometimes resent their incursions.
275Ill blood would be engendered. Hot and fiery
youths, abandoned to their own guidance, would
easily discover excuses for cruelty and revenge. From
quarrels they would proceed to blows—from blows
to assassination; and beaten, perhaps, by day, they
would fall suddenly on the defenceless peasants in
the dead of night, and butcher whole hamlets to
avenge an affront offered to them perhaps by an
individual. Thus, out of a custom blameless enough
in its origin, grew the terrible institution of the
Crypteia,[881] or annual massacre of the Helots, denied
by some modern writers, but too well authenticated,
and too much in keeping with the Spartan character
and general policy, to allow of our indulging in any
scepticism on the point.
But, in addition to the above, there were other
branches of education taught at Sparta,—that is
gymnastics and music. Writers, desirous of enhancing
the mental acquisitions of the Dorians, adhere
somewhat too strictly to the meaning often affixed by
the Greeks to the word music, which they employed
to signify literature. But Xenophon, in his treatise
on the Lacedæmonian Commonwealth, appears invariably
to use it in its limited and modern signification.
To gymnastics the Dorians, upon the whole an unintellectual
people, were naturally much addicted,—far
too much according to ancient writers; but here
again their modern historian steps in to their defence.
He will have it, that it was in later times that they
became philogymnasts, and quotes Dion Chrysostom
as if he was the principal witness. Plato, to be sure, is
referred to as a parasitical authority, and so is Aristotle;[882]
but then the latter only says, that their constant
276violent exercises rendered them brutal, in which the
historian appears to discover no harm. “This want of
moderation, however, though it occurred in later
times, is never perceivable in the maxims and ideas
of the Dorians, who in this, as in several other
cases, know how to set bounds to youthful ardour,
and check its pernicious effects.”[883] This, it appears
to me, is the language of an apologist. If they had
such knowledge, how culpable must they have been
not to check it in the matter of the Crypteia?
It may be observed, however, that though they devoted
to gymnastics too much of their leisure, the fault
lay in them, not in the system of exercises, which was
in itself one of extreme beauty and simplicity. Its
object,—which it was excellently calculated to attain,—was
not to create athletæ but soldiers, not gigantic
strength, but an elastic, agile, beautiful frame, adapted
for all the movements of war. Boxing, accordingly,
and the pancration[884] were banished from their gymnasia,
a regulation evincing at the same time their wisdom
and their taste; the former being the most barbarous
and useless, the latter the most unseemly portion of
gymnastics, often exhibiting the antagonists rolling
and struggling, like savages or animals devoid of reason,
on the ground.
As the ancient idea of education included every
thing employed to develope the powers of body or
mind, we must regard in this light the military games
peculiar to the Spartans and Cretans.[885] Among the
former the youth, having sacrificed to Ares in a temple
at Therapne, passed over into an island dyked
round and called Platanistas, where, dividing off into
separate parties, they engaged in a contest which
277wanted nothing but arms to render it a genuine
battle. A learned historian, seldom sparing of words,
avoids describing this interesting scene; and wherefore?—Because
a faithful description of it must convey
a striking idea of Spartan ferocity. “They exerted”
says he, “every means in their power to obtain
the victory.”—Exactly; but what were those means?
“Adolescentium greges Lacedæmone vidimus ipsi indibili
contentione certantes, pugnis, calcibus, unguibus,
morsu denique; quum exanimarentur priusquam
se victos faterentur.[886]” Yet were these battles carried
on under the eyes of magistrates, the five Bidiæi[887] appointed
to superintend these exercises as well as those
performed elsewhere. The little island where they
fought was a spot of great natural beauty, encircled by
a sheet of clear water, and approached on all sides
through thick and lofty groves of platane trees. A
bridge thrown over the canal led to the island on both
sides, and on the one stood a statue of Heracles, on
the other of Lycurgus. This battle was reckoned
among the institutions of the latter, and under the
protection probably of the former. The preliminaries
to the fight were as follow. They first sacrificed in
the Phœbaion which stands without the city, not far
from Therapne. Here each of the two divisions of
the youth offered up a dog’s whelp to Ares, the
bravest of domestic animals, sacred in their opinion to
the bravest of the Gods. No other Grecian people
sacrificed the dog excepting the Colophonians, who
offered up a black bitch to Hecate. In both cities
the sacrifice was performed by night. After the ceremony
two tame boars were brought forward, one by
each party, which they compelled to fight; and they
whose brute champion proved superior, thence augured
that victory awaited them in the Platanistas.
On the following day, a little before noon, they entered
by the bridges into the island, one party by
one bridge, the other by the other. But the
choice was not left to them, having been determined
278on the preceding night by lot. Being arrived, they
faced each other, and commenced the battle, striking
with the fist, kicking, leaping on each other, tearing
one another with their teeth, and gouging after the
most approved Kentucky fashion. Thus they struggled,
man to man, urging forward together and thrusting
each other into the water.[888] From these words, as
well as from the testimony of Cicero cited above, it is
clear the combat was conducted with no other arms
than those furnished by nature, though Lucian, misemploying
the verb ὁπλομάχειν,[889] would lead us to a different
conclusion. But this kind of battle is always
enumerated among the gymnastic exercises or contests;
and what necessity would there have been to have recourse
to fists, feet, teeth, and nails, had they been
permitted the use of arms? Fatigued with this violent
exertion they betook themselves for a short time
to repose, refreshed by which they resumed their exercises,
dancing in most intricate measures to the
sound of the pipe.[890] Akin in spirit to the contests in
the Platanistas were the ever-recurring battles fought
by the young men with the three hundred followers of
the Hippagretæ; three inferior magistrates appointed
by the Ephori, who selected each one hundred followers
from among the healthiest and bravest of the
youthful population. Against this chosen band all the
other young men of the city were bound by custom to
make war; and, but that they could be parted by any
citizen who might happen to be passing by, it is probable
that these fierce boxing matches would often
have terminated fatally.
Similar customs prevailed in Crete, where, as in
most other parts of Greece, the business of education
appears to have commenced at the age of seven years,
when the cake called Promachos was given to the
boys, because, as it has been conjectured, they were
thenceforward to be trained for fighting. Up to the
age of seventeen they were denominated Apageli,
279since they were not until then admitted into those
Agelæ[891] or bands, in which they thenceforward performed
their exercises. Here, as in Sparta, the greatest
possible care was taken to extirpate from the character
every germ of effeminacy. They ate whatever
food was given them squatting on the ground, not
being permitted to join their elders at the board, and
went abroad in all weathers clad in a single garment,
like the boys of Sparta during their hibernation. However,
the youth of the several Agelæ, armed with stones,
and iron weapons, marching to the sound of flutes, and
assailing each other, converted their exercises into
something very like real warfare. Our cudgel-playing,
single-stick, &c. are pastimes of the same description;
and boxing now nearly exploded, can plead classical
precedent. They were habituated, says Ephoros, to labours
and arms, and taught to despise both heat and
cold, rough roads and cliffs, and the blows they received
in the gymnasium and their mock battles. The use of
the bow formed part of their education, as well as the
armed dance, at first taught by the Curetes, and afterwards
named the Pyrrhic; so that a warlike spirit
breathed through the whole system of their education.[892]
With all these facts before him, though many of
them he has suppressed, the historian of the Doric
race, in direct contradiction to Plato and Aristotle,
contends naïvely that it would be erroneous to conclude
that the aim of bodily exercise among the Dorians
was war, or that in their result they rendered the
youth either brutal or ferocious. Their object, in his
opinion, was to obtain something like ideal beauty of
form, strength, and health, which, he says, they accordingly
attained, being, about B. C. 540, the healthiest of
the Greeks and most renowned for beautiful men and
women. But Xenophon whom, on the subject of
health he quotes, does not authorise his superlative:—"It
280would not be easy," are his words, “to find
healthier or more active men.”[893] Again, the language
of Herodotus by no means bears him out. He, indeed,
affirms that Callicrates, a Spartan, was the handsomest
man in the army at Platæa, but says nothing of the
Spartans being handsomer than the other Greeks; but
rather the contrary. He was not merely the handsomest
man among his countrymen, but, which he evidently
considered more remarkable, among all the
other Greeks.[894]
Not, however, to insist on such points as these,
let us proceed to examine the intellectual cultivation
of the Dorians.[895] That the art of writing never
flourished very generally at Sparta appears to be
on all hands admitted, though we can by no means
doubt that among them numerous individuals possessing
this accomplishment might always be found.
Thus, in the old story of the combat of the three
hundred Spartans and Argives, it is related that
Othryades, the sole survivor of the Laconian band,
having remained last on the field of battle, erected
a trophy and wrote upon it with his blood Λακεδαιμόνιοι
κατ᾽ Ἀργείων, immediately after which he
died of his wounds.[896] Generally, however, no great
stress was laid on a knowledge of the art of writing,
which, in the opinion of some authors, was of comparatively
little value where the people were taught
to chant their laws as well as their songs. Similar
customs and regulations prevailed on this head in
Crete, where, nevertheless, letters appear to have
been viewed with a more favourable eye.[897] In addition
281to their body of legal poetry, which was probably
less voluminous than a metrical version of the
statutes at large, the youth were taught to sing
hymns in honour of the gods and the praises of
illustrious men.[898] In music, too, they were permitted
to make some proficiency, though generally, we
are told, it was their ambition to excel rather in
the regularity of their manners than in the extent
of their acquirements.
With respect to the Spartans it is probable,
though the testimony of ancient writers be sufficiently
contradictory, that no great stress was laid
even on the ability to read; for, while Plutarch[899]
conceives this art to have been among their ordinary
acquirements, Isocrates, a grave and more
competent authority, is decidedly of the opposite
opinion.[900]
Ælian,[901] too, coming in the rear of Plutarch, observes
that the Lacedæmonians were ignorant of
mental culture (μουσικῆς) meaning evidently as Perizonius
has already observed, not “music” as Kühn
would translate it, (for in this they were learned,)
but a knowledge of poetry and eloquence.[902]
That the Spartans were noted for their indifference
to literature, is well known. Even Xenophon,
their apologist, instituting a comparison between their
system of education and that prevailing among the
other Greeks, observes that the latter sent their boys
to school that they might learn their letters, music,
and the exercises of the palæstra, while the former
placed them under the care of a grave man
who might punish them if slothful and inactive, and
282inculcate great modesty and obedience in lieu of the
usual accomplishments. Plato also, in the Greater
Hippias,[903] having observed that their laws were averse
from the reception of foreign learning, adds immediately
after that the majority of them were even ignorant
of arithmetic. In another place,[904] indeed, the
philosopher appears to hold a different language, and
is literally understood by Perizonius. But the reader
who examines the passage attentively, will probably
agree with me in considering it nothing more than
one of those profoundly ironical strokes in which,
above all writers, he abounds. He in fact remarks,
what in another sense may have been very true,
that no countries were more fertile in sophists than
Crete and Lacedæmon, but that they dissembled their
wisdom and feigned ignorance, lest they should appear
to excel all their countrymen in sapience, of
which in reality there was very little danger. He
observes, however, no less ironically, that those rude
and unrhetorical nations were of all men most philosophical
and eloquent, and that it had long been
understood by a great many that to laconise, or act
the Spartan, was rather to be a philosopher than
a diligent student of gymnastics. Perizonius,[905] indeed,
conceives that all this is to be understood of natural
sound sense, applied to morals and those brief and
pithy sayings or λογοὶ, which constituted the science
of laconics.
But, after all, there never was, as Cicero observes,
a single orator among the Spartans; nor could it
be otherwise, since all the arts which beget and
foster eloquence, and, more important still, every
political institution which favours it, were unknown
in their state. Nay, so far did they push their
aversion for the oratorical art, that if any citizen
of Sparta acquired, in his experience abroad, the
283skill artificially to wield a syllogism or a trope, he
was subjected to punishment,[906] while rhetoricians were
expelled the city.[907] Ignorance, therefore, of whatever
learned nations prize, was their chief boast. To
them the sublime speculations of the Academy, and
the logic, sharp and irresistible, of the Lyceum,
were equally strangers; yet their discipline, and the
habits of youth, imparted to them what in modern
jargon is termed a kind of practical “philosophy.”
They understood the great art, at least among them,
how to command their passions; as Maximus Tyrius[908]
relates of Agesilaos who, though educated in no
school of philosophy, was nevertheless not a slave
to love, which therefore the sophist infers could not
be a matter of great difficulty. However there were
limitations to their aversions for learning. They
opened in their state an asylum for those antique
teachers of mankind, the poets,[909] proscribed by Plato,
and were in this respect so superior in good taste
to that philosopher, that they at length, in imitation
of the Great Preceptors of Greece, instituted
public recitations of Homer. And this, Maximus
Tyrius adduces as a proof that many well-constituted
states had existed in which Homer was not publicly
studied, for he could not mean that he was
once entirely unknown at Sparta.[910]
Into the character of the Greeks, generally, there
entered an element but faintly discernible in the
moral composition of modern nations, I mean a most
exquisite and exalted sensibility, which rendered them
to the last degree susceptible, and liable to be swayed
irresistibly for good or for evil by poetry and music.
284And this characteristic distinguished in some degree
the Doric as well as the Ionic race. They could be
excited, past belief, by the agency of sound. Music,
therefore, with us at least a mere source of enjoyment,
among them was invested with a moral character,
and employed in education as a powerful means
of harmonising, purifying, ennobling the principles
and the affections of the heart. For this reason the
government, which in Greece was in reality a Committee
of Public Safety,[911] watched over the music
no less sedulously than over the morals of the people,
which it powerfully influenced. It must, nevertheless,
be confessed that many ancient authors are little
philosophical in relating or reasoning upon the effects
of music. They often confound consequences
with causes. Thus, in the example which certain
authors undoubtingly adduce of the Sicilian Dorians,[912]
whose morals we are told were corrupted by their
fiddlesticks, they omit to inquire whether it was not
rather the natural and necessary degeneracy of a
wealthy people, which corrupted the music. This is
my interpretation. For, in the history of the ancient
Sicilians, I can discover causes enough of lax and
imperfect morals, without calling in the aid of lyre
or cithara. But some writers on this point have an
easy faith. They suppose that the strict domestic
discipline of Sparta “would hardly have been preserved”[913]
without the old-fashioned music.
In whatever way we decide on the metaphysics
of the matter, certain it is that in old times music
was an universal accomplishment in most parts of
Greece; but this was when it was little more than
the chanting of savages, in which, however ignorant,
285any one may join. Exactly in proportion as it rose
into an art its cultivators diminished in number,
until, when a high degree of perfection had been
attained, it was abandoned almost wholly to professional
musicians. The Athenians had been commanded
by the Pythian oracle to chant chorically
in the streets, a divine service in honour of Bacchos.[914]
At Sparta similar performances took place during
the gymnopædia, when choruses of naked men and
boys, with crowns of palm leaves on their heads,
proceeded through the streets singing the songs of
Thaletas and Alcman and the pæans of Dionysidotos.[915]
Mr. Müller, who loves to complete or round off the
accounts he finds in ancient authors, says that, doubtless,
a large portion of the inhabitants of the city
took part in these exhibitions. Perhaps they did,
but we have no authority for such a supposition.
The place in the agora which contained statues of
Apollo, Artemis and Leto, was called Choros,[916] because
there the Ephebi danced in choruses in honour of
Apollo. On these occasions unwarlike persons were
sometimes thrust into the least honourable places,[917]
while bachelors were excluded; so that, as Schneider
has well remarked, cowardice was less dishonourable
than celibacy. But it does not at all appear that
the Spartans themselves were ever good musicians,
though they were not incapable of relishing good
music;[918] and hence the foreign musicians who flocked
thither found a welcome reception. The developement
of the warlike constitution of the state threw
the favourable side of their discipline into the shade.[919]
The Arcadians, likewise, made great use of music
in their system of education, and, though otherwise a
rude race, continued to practise it up to the age of
thirty. Among them alone, in fact, were children
286accustomed from infancy to sing, in certain measures,
hymns and poems, in which they celebrated the
praises of the gods and heroes of their country.
After this, observes Polybius,[920] they learned the nomoi
of Timotheus and Philoxenos, and every year
during the Dionysia formed choruses in the theatre,
where they danced to the sound of the flute. Here
boys contended with antagonists of their own age,
and the young men with those more advanced towards
their prime. During the whole of their lives
they frequented these public assemblies, where they
instructed each other by their songs, and not by
means of foreign actors. With respect to other
branches of education they considered it no disgrace
to profess themselves ignorant; but not to know how
to sing would, in Arcadia, have been a mark of
extreme vulgarity. They habituated themselves to
walk with gravity to the sound of the flute,
and, having been thus instructed at the expense of
the state, proceeded once a year in public procession
to the theatre. Their ancestors introduced these
customs, not with any view to pleasure, or that they
might grow rich by the exercise of their talents, but
in order to soften the austerity of character which
their cold and murky atmosphere would otherwise
have engendered. For the character of nations is
invariably analogous to the air they breathe, and it is
the geographical position of races which determines
alone their temper of mind and the colour and configuration
of their bodies.
Besides what has already been said of the Arcadians,
it may be added, that it was customary among
them for the men and women to unite in chanting
certain odes, and to offer up sacrifices in common.
There were also dances in which the youth of both
sexes joined, and their object was to create and
diffuse humane and gentle manners.
But the same habits were not prevalent throughout
287the whole country. The Kynæthes made no progress
in these humanising arts, and as they dwelt in the
rudest districts of Arcadia, and breathed the crudest
air, their ferocity became proverbial; they addicted
themselves to strife and contention, and degenerated
into the fiercest and most untameable savages in
Greece. In fact, obtaining possession of several cities,
they shed so much blood that the whole nation
was roused, and at length united in expelling them
the land. Even after their departure the Mantinæans
thought it necessary to purify the soil by sacrifices,
expiations, and the leading of victims round the whole
boundary line.
Dancing very naturally constituted a separate
branch of education at Sparta as in Crete. In both
places the execution of the Pyrrhic appears to have
been regarded as a necessary accomplishment, the
youths, from the age of fifteen or earlier, having been
taught to perform it in arms.[921] It was or is—for the
Pyrrhic still lingers in Greece,
“Ye have the Pyrrhic dance as yet—”
an exhibition purely military. The dancers, accoutred
with spear and shield, went gracefully and vigorously
through a number of movements, wheeling,
advancing, giving blows or shunning them, as in real
action.[922] In other parts of Greece, however, the
Pyrrhic quickly degenerated in character, becoming
little better than a wild dance of Bacchanals.[923] It
has been rightly observed that at Sparta “the chief
object of the Gymnopædia was to represent gymnastic
exercises and dancing in intimate union, and, indeed,
the latter only as the accomplishment and
end of the former.”[924] One of the dances, resembling
the Anapale, partook of a Bacchanalian character.”character.”[925]
288The youth, also, when skilled in these exercises,
danced in rows behind each other to the
music of flutes, both military and choral dances, at
the same time, repeating an invitation in verse to
Aphrodite and Eros to join them, and an exhortation
to each other.[926]
It will be seen from the above details that the object
of education at Sparta was rather the formation of
habits and the disciplining of the mind to act in exact
conformity with the laws, than to develope to their
fullest extent the intellectual powers of individuals.
They desired to amalgamate the whole energies of
the people into one mass, upon the supposition that
being thus impelled in any particular direction they
would prove irresistible. No account was made of
private happiness. Everything seems to have been
devised for the effecting of national purposes, though
from the known laws of the human mind even the
restraint and tyrannical interference of such a system
would with time be reconciled to the feelings and
contribute to individual content. But very much
of what renders life sweet, was sacrificed. Letters
and arts, that subordinate creation, that world within
a world which the beneficence of Providence has permitted
man to call into existence, were at Sparta
unknown. They enjoyed little or nothing of that
refined delight which arises from multiplying the
almost conscious fruits of the soul, from sending
winged thoughts abroad to move, enchant, electrify
millions, from deifying truth and confounding error,
from ascending to the greatest heights of mortality,
and diffusing from thence a light and a glory to
warm and illuminate and gladden the human race
for ever. This greater felicity was reserved for the
education of Athens, which must, therefore, in all
enlightened times, bear away the palm of excellence
and utility.
289CHAPTER IX.
INFLUENCE OF THE FINE ARTS ON EDUCATION.
It behoves us now to quit the circle of studies,
which, taken together, are commonly supposed to
constitute the whole of education, and consider the
influence exercised by other elements on the minds
of the Hellenic youth. Even in these days we
speak intelligibly and correctly of that experience
which young men gain on their first entrance into
life, from travel and fashionable society, as of a
particular stage in their education, it being during
that period that they learn to estimate the value
of their school acquirements, how advantageously to
conceal or display them according to circumstances,
and to bend the neck, perchance, of their lofty theories
and sublime speculations to the yoke of the
world. But in Greece this was more palpably the
case; for, though escaped from the formal rule of
preceptors and pædagogues, the youth had still to
master several departments of study, either by their
own independent exertions or under the guidance
of judicious friends: I mean those infinitely varied
creations of art and literature, which, as they are
in harmony with them or otherwise, confirm or subvert
the principles and discipline of the schools.
Thoroughly to comprehend, therefore, the nature
and extent of that sway which the state and its
institutions directly or indirectly exerted over the
minds of the citizens, it is necessary briefly to inquire
into the character of the plastic and mimetic
arts which found encouragement in the Grecian commonwealths,
and afterwards to examine for a moment
290the stores of thought and sentiment and passion,
and piety and virtue, which the literature and
religion of Greece laid open to the contemplation
of those who were entering upon the career of life.
We shall begin with the arts, as they were the inculcators
of the principle of the beautiful, advance
next to literature, the teacher of wisdom and patriotism,
concluding with religion, which opened up
to their view a prospect, though dim, of heaven,
and directed their footsteps thitherward.
It is certain that, to the generality, the vast superiority
of the Greeks in the arts, which like an
universal language need no translation, is more palpable
and apparent than their superiority in literature;
though Demosthenes be in reality as much
above any orator, Thucydides above any historian,
Plato above any philosopher, Homer above any epic
poet, Milton perhaps excepted, who has since written,
as Pheidias, or Polycletos, or Praxiteles rose above
any sculptor of the north. Nor can we account for
this any more than we can explain why Shakespeare
was superior to Ford or Massinger. Nature infused
more genius into their souls. They loved
or rather worshiped the beautiful. It breathed
within and around them: their minds were pregnant
with it, and, when they brought forth, beauty
was their offspring. Thus Aristophanes[927] insinuates,
that even the gods borrowed much of their majesty
and splendour from the human mind, when
he says, that heaven-born peace derived her loveliness
from some relationship to Pheidias.
Religion, in one sense, may be called the parent of
the fine arts; but it would perhaps be more philosophical
to consider religion and the arts as twin sisters,
both sprung from that yearning after the ideal which
constituted the most marked feature in the Hellenic
mind. We must carry back our investigations very
far, if we would discover them radiant with loveliness
291in their cradle; but when they issued thence it was
to shed light over the earth, a light derived from the
skies. For man does not originate his ideas of the
beautiful, which fall like images from heaven on the
speculum of his mind; he gives back but what he
receives. The conception of beauty is an inspiration,
a thing which does not come when called upon; or
rather, shining on all, it is lost on the dull and opaque
fancy, and is reflected only from the luminous and
bright.
Man needs companionship always, and the creative
and imaginative make to themselves companions
of their own ideas, and clothe them in material forms
to render the illusion more complete. There is an
impassioned intercourse between the soul and its offspring.
We love nothing like that which has sprung
from ourselves, and in this we are truly the image of
God, who saw all things that he had made, and, behold,
they were very good. And he loved his creation;
and from him we inherit, as his children, the
love we bear to our creations. Hence the enthusiasm
for art, hence the power and the inspiration of poetry.
They are not things of earth. They are the seeds of
immortality ripening prematurely here below; and
therefore we should love them. They are the warrant,
the proof that we are of God; that we are
born to exercise an irresistible sway over the elements;
that our thrones are building elsewhere;
that in the passion for whatever is spiritual we exhibit
instinctively indubitable tokens that spirits we
are, and in a spiritual world only can find our home.
It does not belong to this work to attempt a history
of Grecian art, which in a certain sense has been
already written. My object, if I can accomplish it, is
to describe the spirit by which that art was created
and sustained, and this I should do triumphantly if
love were synonymous with power; for never, since
the fabled artist hung enamoured over the marble he
had fashioned, did any man’s imagination cleave more
earnestly to the spirit that presided over Grecian art,
292not the plastic merely but every form of it, from the
epic in poetry and sculpture down to the signet ring
and the drinking song. But the thing is an ample
apology for the enthusiasm. There, if anywhere, we
discover the culminating point of human intellect and
human genius;—there
“The vision and the faculty divine”
meet us at every step. Even the fragments of her
literature and her art are gathered up and treasured
in all civilised countries, as if the fate of our race were
mystically bound up in them. And so it is: for
when we cease to love the beautiful, of which they are
the most perfect realisation we know, our own race of
glory and greatness will have been run: we shall be
close on the verge, nay, within the pale of barbarism.
Socrates used to say, that whatever we know we
can explain; but not so always with what we feel.
There is in the ideal of beauty, which formed the vivifying
principle of Greek art, a certain subtile and fugitive
delicacy, a certain nameless grace, a certain volatile
and fleeting essence, which defy definition, and, rejecting
the aid of language, persist in presenting themselves
naked to the mind. And by the mind only,
and only, moreover, by the inspired mind, can they
be discerned.
It was in the attempt, however, to chain this
spirit, and to imprison it in durable forms, that all
the poetry and arts of Greece consisted. They beheld
within them a world of loveliness, of living
forms which knocked at the golden door of fancy,
and demanded their dismissal from the spiritual to
the material universe. All their studies were but
how to dress these celestial habitants in fitting habiliments
to go abroad in; and their lives were often
spent in the throes of creatures big with immortal
beauty. It is a privilege to the world to converse
with minds of such a nature. It is ennobling to
approach them. Their energy, their vivifying power
continues ever active, ever operating, and if high art
293be ever to flourish and command, not admiration,
but love in England, it can only be by kindling
here the lamp removed from Greece, but essentially
Greek, that is, essentially beautiful.
The proof that religion issued with art from the
same womb in Greece, and was not its parent, is
supplied by every other country. There is religion
elsewhere, while nowhere is there art like that of
the Greeks. But religion had nevertheless much
to do with the forms in which the creative faculty
there developed itself, as it invariably has with whatever
is great or beautiful among men. The persuasion
arose in them that the inhabitants of Olympos
could be represented by material forms, and as they
found their own reverence for the divine being represented,
augment in proportion to the beauty or grandeur
of its image, the conclusion was natural that
the deity himself would be pleased by the same rule,
so that their piety was their first and most powerful
incentive to excellence. They hoped to recommend
themselves to the gods, as they did to their countrymen,
by the greatness of their workmanship;
and veneration from without, and piety from within,
united in urging them forward. And this, with the
poet equally as with the artist, inflamed the desire
to excel.
There are, as has already been observed,[928] three
periods in the history of art: 1st. that, in which the
necessary is sought; 2ndly, that in which the study
of the beautiful is pursued; and 3dly, the period
of superfluity and extravagance. But in some countries
men appear to pass from the first to the third,
without traversing the second. Thus, in Egypt,
Persia, Etruria, in Germany, Holland, France, England[929]
the wild, the grotesque, the terrible have been
294aimed at, seldom the beautiful. Even in Italy,
where in modern times art has taken firmest root
and most luxuriantly flourished, the object sought
to be attained has lain on a lower level. Among
the northern nations the grotesque variously disguised
or modified is the spirit of art; among the
Italians it is voluptuousness, among the Greeks the
beautiful. Hence no Greek statue of the flourishing
period of art is indecent.[930] Naked it may be,
but like the nakedness of infancy, it is chaste as
a mother’s love. Our thoughts are instantly carried
away by it to the regions of poetry; the soft influence
of the ideal descends like dew upon our fancy;
we are elevated above the region of the passions
to heights where all is sunny and calm and pure.
The beautiful is chaste as an icicle, yet warm as
love. It breathes in Raffaelle’s virgins which we
regard as some “bright particular star,” things to
inspire a holy affection, a love not akin to earth.
Yet this beauty is not distanced from us by its
severity: no! but by its intense innocence, by its
unsullied purity, by its inexpressible concentration
and mingling up of maternity and girlhood. It was
this beauty that Milton sought in his Comus to
express, when he represents chastity as its own
guard. And this is preëminently the spirit breathing
295through Grecian art. In the Artemis, in the
Athena, nay, even in Aphrodite or Leda, or an orgiastic
Bacchante, the overruling sense of beauty,
after the first flutter of sensation, hurries the imagination
far beyond all considerations of sex or passion.
The root of all the pleasures we feel, seems to be
hidden under the load of three thousand years, not
because the things are old, but because they are
the material representatives of a period when the
foot of the beautiful rested on the earth.
No doubt we come prepared to regard them with
eyes coloured, and a fancy haunted by the beauties
of Grecian literature. Possibly, it is under the spell
of Homeric verse that our eyes grow humid with
delight at the aspect of Aphrodite, that we behold
divinity in Zeus or Phœbos Apollo; but this only
proves that the fragments of Hellenic civilisation
throw a light upon each other, and are parts of one
great whole. Perhaps, too, no man ever enjoyed
the sculpture of Greece as he should, unless conversant
with her poetry—the right hand of her art.
In this we find the first seeds and increments of
those ideas, which were afterwards transplanted and
bore fruit in another field. We discover, therefore,
but half the subject when we see only the sculpture.
It is unknown to us whether the artist has fulfilled
the conditions into which he entered, by undertaking
to clothe in marble, thoughts already invested with
the forms of language. Hence the little sympathy
between Hellenic art and the people generally of
modern nations. The figures they behold are dumb
to them. To a Greek, on the contrary, or to a man
with a Greek’s soul, a thousand sweet reminiscences,
a thousand legends, a thousand dim but cherished
associations appear clustering round them. Every
time they flash upon him, he lives his youth over
again. The briery nook, the dewy lanes, the dim
religious forests, the pebbly or wave-fretted shore,
where the poetry of Greece first opened its eyes
upon him in boyhood, sweep in procession over his
296fancy. He starts to see the hamadryad or the faun
or the mountain nymph, before him but one remove
from life; to him art speaks not merely in an intelligible,
but in an impassioned tongue. He comprehends
all the mysteries she has to reveal, and loves
her because in a land as it were of foreigners they
can converse with each other, and speak of the past
and the future.
It is scarcely philosophical to regard poetry, sculpture,
and painting, as the offspring of pleasure, though
pleasure in some sense be as necessary to man as food.
Man possesses creative and imitative faculties, and
must, at certain stages of society, employ them. The
moment his merely animal wants are provided for, he
begins to feel that he has others which demand no
less imperiously their gratification. First, he desires
to clothe with material forms the things he worships,
and hence the first-born of art are gods. At the
outset, indeed, (and this is a strong argument against
their having borrowed their arts from the East,)[931]
the Greeks were content with setting up rude stones,
as symbols rather than representations of their divinities;
then followed the head upon a rude pillar;
then, the indications of the sex; next, the round
thighs began to swell out of the stone; to these succeeded
legs and feet; and, lastly, arms and hands
completed the figure. Dædalos, a mythological personage,
is supposed to have been the first who carried
the art to this point of improvement. His
figures were of wood, and already executed with
considerable skill, though they would have been
despised in the days of Socrates.[932]
For some ages, perhaps, a stiff, unanimated manner,
not unlike the Egyptian, prevailed; but the
impulse, once given, went on increasing in strength.
297One improvement imperceptibly followed another.
Artists, together with their experience, acquired professional
learning, the results of which soon became
visible in their productions. Movement and variety
of position succeeded. But though knowledge of art
was enlarged and strict rules laid down, there still
remained a hard, square massiveness in the style,
resembling what we find in modern sculpture as
improved by Michael Angelo. And this manner
became the type of the Æginetan school, which expressed
the character of the Doric mind, powerful
but rude, harmonious but heavy, wanting in grace,
wanting in elegance, and aiming rather at effect
than beauty.[933]
Numerous causes, however, concurred in ripening
the principle of art in Greece,—the climate, the
form of government, the happy taste of the people,
and, lastly, the high respect which was there paid to
artists. Nor is it at all paradoxical to affirm, that
moral causes concurred powerfully with physical, in
begetting that radiant beauty of countenance which
distinguished the nation. The consciousness of freedom
and independence produces satisfaction in the
mind; the serenity thus originated communicates
itself to the features; thence arise harmony and
dignity of aspect and mien; these are so many elements
of beauty, and such feelings long indulged
would operate powerfully on the countenance, and,
seconded by the tranquillising influences of external
nature, end by creating symmetry and proportion,
which, joined with intellect, are beauty. Artists in
such a country, besides that they must themselves
involuntarily be impressed with a veneration for it,
would soon discover the reverence paid to beauty and
the value set upon accurate representations of it.
Of the high estimation in which beauty was held
innumerable proofs exist in Greek literature. At
Ægion in Achaia, the priest of Zeus was chosen
298for the splendour of his personal charms, to determine
which a sort of contest was instituted. This office
he held till his beard began to appear, when the
honour passed to the youth then judged to excel[934]
in the perfection of his form. So, also, at Tanagra,
the youth selected to bear the lamb round the walls
in honour of Hermes was supposed to be the first
for beauty in the city.[935] Of the involuntary power
of beauty history has recorded various instances.
Phrynè, accused of impiety and on the point of being
condemned, obtained her acquittal through the hardihood
of her advocate, who bared her bosom before
the judges. Another example is said to have
been afforded by Corinna, sole poetess of Tanagra,
who, contending with Pindar for the prize of verse,
obtained the victory more by her beauty, (she being
the loveliest woman of her time,) and the sweetness
of the Æolic dialect in which she wrote, than by
the greatness of her genius.[936]
In another instance heroic honours were paid to
a man after death for the beauty of his person.[937]
This happened at Egestum in Sicily, where Philippos,
a native of Crotona, obtained this distinction,
which Herodotus observes never fell to any other
man’s lot before.[938]
It was to its artists that Greece delegated, at least
in some instances, the privilege of deciding on the
rival pretensions of the fair and beautiful. They
were permitted to select from the loveliest women
of the land models for their female divinities, and
at other times made their mistresses the representatives
299of goddesses. Pains were taken, by filling
their apartments with beautiful statues, to impress
upon the imagination of pregnant women the perfect
forms of gods and heroes, as of Nireus, Narcissos,
Hyacinthos, Castor and Polydeukes, Bacchos
and Apollo.[939] This was at Sparta. In other parts
of the Peloponnesos a species of Olympic contest for
the prize of beauty took place, instituted, it is said,
by Cypselos, an ancient king of Arcadia. Having
founded a city in the plain on the banks of the
Alpheios, in which he fixed a colony of Parrhasians,
he dedicated a temple and altar, and instituted a
festival in honour of Eleusinian Demeter, during
which the women of the neighbourhood disputed
with each other the prize, and received from some
circumstance connected with the contest the name
of Chrysophoræ. The first woman who won was
Herodice, wife of the founder Cypselos. This institution
flourished upwards of fourteen hundred years,
having been established in the time of the Heracleidæ,
and still existing in the age of Athenæus.[940]
A similar practice prevailed in the islands of Tenedos
and Lesbos, where likewise the ebullitions of
vanity were concealed beneath the veil of religion.
The exhibition took place in the temple of Hera,
to whom, as the goddess of marriage, beauty should
be dear. Priapos, however, was in some places supposed
to be the deity who awarded the prize of
loveliness in the Callisteia, on which account Niconoë,
a Bacchante perhaps, dedicated to him her fawn-skin
and golden ewer.[941] But the ladies were not
singular in these displays. For among the Eleians,
300who had as favourable an opinion of themselves as
Oliver Goldsmith, a similar show took place, and the
pretensions of the male candidates were as carefully
sifted as if they had been to take academical honours
on their figures. And honours in fact they did take.
They were presented with a complete suit of armour,
which the winner consecrated with extraordinary pomp
and rejoicing in the temple of Athena, whither he
was led garlanded with fillets by his triumphant
friends. According to Myrsilos, he was likewise decorated
with a myrtle crown.[942]
In some places, not named by historians, a contest
was instituted which, though unconnected with the
arts, we will intreat the reader’s permission to introduce
here, for its extraordinary nature. This was
a contest in prudence and good housewifery, in which
certain barbarian nations followed the example. And,
to show that character and mental qualifications were
properly esteemed by the Greeks, it is added by Theophrastos[943]
that it is these that render beauty beautiful,
and that without them it is apt to degenerate
into wantonness. Winkelmann, who has noticed several
of these facts, is betrayed into some errors.
He speaks of an Apollo of Philesia[944] at whose festival
a prize was bestowed on the youth who excelled
in kissing. The contest took place under the inspection
of a judge, he supposes, at Megara. Meursius,
though under the name of Diocleia he notices the
Megarean festival, overlooks the writer who gives
the fullest account of it;—I mean the scholiast on
Theocritus, who observes that Diocles was an Athenian
exile who took refuge at Megara. In a battle
in which he was engaged, he fought side by side
with a friend, whose life he saved at the expense of
301his own. He was interred by the Megareans, who
instituted an annual festival in his honour, where
the youth who excelled his companions was crowned
and led in triumph to the arms of his mother.[945]
The exercises, discipline, and moral notions of the
Greeks had doubtless much effect on their form; for
in the decline of their states, when despotism had succeeded
to freedom, and vice to virtue, beauty became
exceedingly rare. Cotta, in the De Naturâ Deorum,
observes that he found few handsome youths at
Athens, where in the age of Demosthenes the most
beautiful in Greece flourished;[946] and Dion Chrysostom
observes that in his time there were scarcely any
that could be so considered.[947]
If we come now to the other causes which account
for the progress of the arts in Greece, we shall find
the principal of these to have been the high consideration
and esteem[948] in which artists were held. Riches,
no doubt, obtained credit there as elsewhere, but not
to the exclusion of other recommendations as in modern
Europe, or at least in England. Winkelmann
scarcely comprehends the irony of Socrates, however,
when he supposes him seriously to mean that artists
alone were wise; though, since the sage had himself
been a sculptor, he had some reason to think well of
them. It is, nevertheless, perfectly true that men of
this profession might become legislators or generals,
or even behold a statue erected to them beside those
of Miltiades and Themistocles, or among the gods
themselves.[949] The historian of art observes with pride
that Xenophilos and Straton were permitted at Argos
to place their own statues, even in a sitting posture,
near those of Asclepios and Hygeia.[950] Cheirisophos,
who sculptured the Apollo at Tegea, dedicated in the
same fane a statue of himself in marble, which was
302erected close to his great work.[951] The figure of Alcamenes
occupied a place among the bassi-rilievi on the
temple of Demeter at Eleusis. Parrhasios and Silanion
shared the reverence paid to their picture of
Theseus; and Pheidias affixed his name to his Olympian
Zeus, the nearest approach perhaps which the
arts have ever made to perfection.[952]
If the satisfaction of beholding a whole nation, I
might say a whole world, smitten with delight and
wonder at his performance, would repay an artist for
years of toil and study, Pheidias had his reward. And
not to the narrow circle of his life was this admiration
confined; for six hundred years after his death pilgrims
from all parts of the civilised world flocked to Olympia[953]
to behold his matchless performance; for to die
without having partaken of this enjoyment was considered
a misfortune. But neither praise, nor encouragement,
nor honour, nor gain will suffice to bring the
arts to perfection. To ensure this, the nation to which
the arts address themselves must comprehend their
language. For, if the people be incapable of deciding
when an artist has succeeded and when he has failed,
it is very certain that he will seldom succeed at all.
Men soon find the uselessness of producing what no
one around them can appreciate. Even in the matter
of virtue and vice, few will soar very high in countries
where a low standard of morals prevails generally;
and, in the arts, no one will devote himself to the creation
of forms which he knows will be dumb to the
public eye.
In Greece every condition required to ripen the
genius of an artist existed. He knew that his reputation
and fortune would depend on the caprice of no
particular individual or class of individuals. He perceived
among his countrymen at large the knowledge,
303the taste, and the enthusiasm which just decisions in
art demand, and laboured fearlessly for them, not
doubting that he should obtain the reward his genius
merited. There were public exhibitions, as among
us, both at Corinth and at Delphi;[954] but, instead of converting
them into a sordid traffic, the whole world was
invited to behold their performances, and judges were
appointed to decide upon the merits of the exhibitors.
Instances no doubt there were of artists showing their
performances for money: at least the memory of one
example has come down to us. Zeuxis of Heraclea,
having finished his picture of Helen, opened an exhibition
and fixed a certain admission price, by which he
cleared a large sum of money; but to mark their disapprobation
of such conduct, his contemporaries bestowed
on his picture the name of the courtesan.[955]
In the public exhibitions they appear to have
looked solely to merit, and not to have allowed themselves
to be dazzled by great names; for when Panænos,
brother of Pheidias, entered the lists, neither his
own reputation, nor that of the illustrious sculptor,
could obtain for him the preference over Timagoras,
who was allowed to have excelled. A like spirit prevailed
among the judges of Olympia, whither artists
sometimes brought their pictures during the games to
delight assembled nations, and reap a harvest of joy
and glory in a day. Thus when Ætion appeared with
his “Marriage of Alexander and Roxana,” before the
Hellanodicos Proxenides,[956] he not only obtained the
credit due to his genius, but that magistrate, more
emphatically to express his admiration, bestowed on
him the hand of his daughter. And Lucian, who had
seen the picture in Italy, has left a description of it
which justifies the enthusiasm of Proxenides.
I have already in a former chapter accounted in
some measure for the diffusion of a correct taste among
304the great body of the people. It formed with them
an indispensable branch of study. The arts of design
were cultivated by the philosopher, the politician, in
short, by every one who claimed to be considered a
gentleman.[957] Nay, gentlewomen also enjoyed these advantages,
and instances are recorded of their arriving
at professional excellence and celebrity; for example,
Timarete,[958] daughter of the younger Micon, an Athenian,
and Helen an Alexandrian Greek, who painted
the “Battle of the Issos,” afterwards consecrated in
the temple of Peace.[959] It was in the nature of things,
that artists moving in such a moral atmosphere should
partake largely of the national grandeur of sentiment,
and look rather to the perpetuation of their name than
to any sordid considerations of gain, above which they
were elevated by the form which the national gratitude
assumed. For we may be sure that what is related
of the great historian of Halicarnassos was, to a
certain extent, true of great artists. Men pointed at
him, we are told, as he moved through the public assemblies,
exclaiming, “That is he! That is the man
who has celebrated our victories over the Barbarians!”
Winkelmann, who understood human nature no less
than the arts, enumerates similar facts among the
causes why art flourished in Greece;[960] and though
sometimes mistaken, as in so large a work was to be
expected, his reasoning generally, and his illustrations,
deserve that every lover of art should be familiar with
his writings.
This distinguished historian, however, is not sufficiently
guarded in his expressions, when he contends
that the productions of art were consecrated solely
to the deity or to public utility; for, though they were
principally directed to these ends, many individuals
possessed collections in their houses,[961] which were by
no means the humble dwellings he supposes. However
305the public constituted the great patron of art, and
uniting in itself natural aptitude, acquired knowledge,
and an inherent leaning towards grandeur, communicated
to those who laboured to gratify it corresponding
taste and elevation. In many cases the whole population
of a city identified its own glory with that of
some celebrated picture or statue within its walls.
Olympia, though peopled by works of art of surpassing
excellence, still looked upon the Pheidian Zeus[962] as the
apex of its glory; and even Athens, where probably
more objects of art were crowded together than in any
other city of the world, the colossal statue of Athena
stood preëminently the ornament of the Acropolis.
In one respect we have begun to imitate the Greeks,
who often erected by general subscription the statue
of a divinity, or of some Athletæ victorious in the sacred
games. Some minor cities are solely remembered
for the works of art they contained: for example, that
of Aliphera which owed its celebrity entirely to its
statue of Athena in bronze, the work of Hecatodoros
and Sostratos.[963]
Winkelmann supposes that both sculpture and painting
arrived earlier at a certain degree of perfection
than architecture, and, assuming the fact, proceeds
philosophically to account for it. But his theory itself,
on this point, appears to be erroneous. In Egypt,
at least, where the mind would necessarily be guided
by the same laws as in Greece, it is certain that while
sculpture and painting never escaped from the swaddling
bands of infancy, architecture advanced to a very
high degree of perfection. The force of necessity,
which leads to the creation of architecture, communicates
a far more lasting impulse than the instinct of
imitation. Men must everywhere build to protect
themselves from the fury of the elements; and the first
step thus made, and leisure supervening, that sense of
306proportion and symmetry and arrangement, which is
almost an instinct, would soon lead to the contemplation
of the ideal and the creation of architecture as an
art. Sculpture sprang later into existence, and still
later painting; but like the children of one family,—of
whom some are older, others younger,—all the arts
flourish nearly together, and nearly together decay.
Nevertheless we may subdivide this period into minuter
cycles, when we shall find that architecture and
sculpture reached almost like twins their acme together,
while, like a younger sister, painting attained its greatest
beauty when the former two had fallen something
from their perfection. Thus, the Zeus of Pheidias and
the Hera of Polycletos, two of the most celebrated
statues of antiquity, already existed, while Hellenic
painting exhibited no knowledge of chiaro-scuro and
was wholly destitute of harmony.
Apollodoros and after him Zeuxis, master and disciple,[964]
who flourished about the ninetieth Olympiad, were
the first who rendered themselves remarkable for a
knowledge of light and shade.[965] But, arrived at this
pitch, the beauty of the art began to be felt, picture
galleries were commenced in various temples,[966] and,
a new world of forms and colours disclosing itself to
the imagination, the versatile Greeks transferred to
it a large share of the admiration hitherto monopolised
by sculpture. Painting, in fact, speaks a more
popular language. It tells a story, while sculpture
can but embody a thought or fix an incident. Its accessories
realise events more completely. The Apollo,
in sculpture, has bent his bow and discharged his
307arrow—the remainder of the action the imagination
must shape for itself. Painting gives us the whole
scene teeming with life,—the writhing dragon, the
rocks, the woods, the mountain, the sky, with all
the illusions spread before the eye by many-coloured
light. Sculpture furnishes the nucleus of glorious
associations, but ’tis we that must group them into
sublime beauty. It asks more knowledge, more
fancy, more in short of every element of genius in
its admirers than does painting. Hence the latter
will always number, and justly, more partisans. In
most persons a preference for sculpture would be
mere affectation. It cannot equally please the many.
However, in proportion as the public became more
enlightened, and, to justify its admiration and enthusiasm,
imposed harder conditions on artists, the
latter enlarged the circle of their studies, which gradually
expanded until it embraced a certain portion
of metaphysics, the science of form and colours,
with that art of grouping and arrangement which
constitutes a species of narrative in painting. A
complete exposition of their studies would be the
best manual which could be put into the hands of
contemporary artists, and at the same time would
furnish the best explanation of their seemingly inexplicable
superiority. But such an exposition would
be out of place here. My object is simply to hint
at what may be done, not to attempt it myself; and
to show, that if the Greek nation afforded encouragement
to its artists, it was because those artists
met their countrymen more than half way, and laboured
to deserve encouragement.
There existed in Greece a philosophy of art, that
is, a perfect theory of what its object is, and of
all the means by which that object may be accomplished.
Now the object of art is delight, a
delight which aggrandises and ennobles the mind,
and such delight is only to be obtained through the
contemplation of the beautiful. This conviction established,
the studies of the Greek artist were directed
308to the discovery of the elements of the beautiful,
not such as it exists in the original types of
the intellectual world (which he abandoned to the
philosopher), but such as we find it in material developements
of the ideal, and chiefly in the forms
of our own species.
Their researches, conducted in a philosophical spirit,
by degrees taught them that perfect beauty, like perfect
happiness, consists in absolute serenity and repose.
Thus, the heavens are beautiful when in the
noon of a summer’s day their blue depths are unstained
by a cloud, and not a breath is heard among
the trees. Thus, the ocean is beautiful when the
most perfect calm broods upon it, and has smoothed
down every ripple and converted it into a mirror for
reflecting the cerulean purity of the sky. And this
is what the poets signify when they represent Aphrodite,
the very soul of beauty and of love, springing
up from the level and glittering surface of such a
sea. In the same state the human countenance is
most beautiful, when every feature in the most perfect
equilibrium breathes of calm, joy, and serenity,
and by the force of sympathy converts all who approach
it into so many mirrors reflecting its absolute
bliss. This is the secret of that beauty which exists
in Grecian sculpture.
It was a maxim of Greek philosophy, that the
magnanimous man is seldom, under any circumstances,
disturbed. In action, therefore, he would exhibit the
same tranquil countenance as when at rest. Thus,
Socrates at Potidæa, at Delion, in the Prison of
the Eleven about to quaff the hemlock, would in
looks be much the same. And this self-command,
observable in one great man, art attributed generally
to the gods and heroes, who, in whatever actions
they might be engaged, would still retain a self-possessed
and serene aspect. Hence, even the battle-pieces
of the Greeks are beautiful. Men fight
and die, but under the guidance of duty. We
behold none of those demoniacal passions, nothing
309of that animal ferocity, or of that succumbing to
pain which convert so many modern pictures into
slaughter-house representations. We feel that the
actors contemplated death only as the distributor of
imperishable glory,—that imagination had coloured
everything around them with its rainbow tints,—that
by anticipation they enjoyed the panegyric which
would be pronounced over them in the hearing of
all they loved,—the monument which would be
raised over their ashes,—the deathless reward which
would be bestowed on their patriotism and valour
in the historic page. To men, so feeling and so
thinking, where was the sting of death? They could
compress eternity into a moment, and grasp all future
time, and live through it by the irresistible force of
imagination.
To be able to represent such forms and features,
it was necessary to study simultaneously the conceptions
of the poets, and the progressive developement
of the human figure from infancy to age.
From this study resulted a body of experience, the
fruit of innumerable comparisons, out of which sprang
that gradually corrected and improved and elevated
conception of the human figure which is denominated
the ideal. Instances, isolated from the great
body of artistic study, have crept into ordinary books,
and been thereby invested with an air of vulgarity.
But this will not hinder the philosopher or the artist
from including them in his scheme of study and converting
them into germs of utility. In this part of
their progress religion stepped in to the aid of the
artist. The several goddesses represented each a
style of women of whom they might be considered
the original type. Aphrodite, for example, represented
the impassioned and tender,[967] naturally parasites
310of man and too often frail; Hera, the chaste
matron, dignified, authoritative, energetic, but inclined
to violence and self-will; Artemis, reserved,
modest, retiring, like a nun, was the prototype of
unspotted maidenhood, revered for its own purity;
Athena, perfect in intellect as in form, uniting the
loveliness of Aphrodite, the majesty of Hera, the
delicacy and chastity of Artemis with the wisdom
of Zeus, constituted properly the ideal of womanhood,
loftier than Eve before the fall and such as
it can exist only in the imagination.
In search, however, of female forms to represent
these ideal originals artists travelled through the
whole of Greece, gathering up as they went those
fragments of beauty which, when united, were to
approach perfection. They resembled Isis in search
of the limbs of Osiris. Sometimes, as at Crotona
and Agrigentum, parents did not scruple to expose
their daughters naked to their eyes, that from them
they might fashion that loveliness which was to represent
to their senses the divine being they worshiped.
But this excess of superstition was rare.
In general the Hetairæ, their mistresses and companions,
served for the models after which the soft
divinities of Greece were moulded:
“If Queensberry to strip there’s no compelling,
’Tis from a handmaid we must take a Helen.”
Thus Phryne, idealised by art, became Aphrodite,
Anadyomene in the hands of Apelles, or Aphrodite
of Cnidos in those of Praxiteles.
Childhood obtained its representative in Eros the
god of love. Thus, from infancy upwards, even to
old age, the human form in all its phases became
the object of study to the Greek artist, not to be
servilely copied, but to be idealised, to be clothed
with poetry, to be divested of everything mean,
gross, unspiritual, and embalmed in eternal beauty.
And their success is proved by this, that, even with
their works before them, modern artists have never
311been able satisfactorily to imitate their excellences.
Of this Winkelmann[968] mentions some examples which
have not come under my own notice. “Although
the best modern artists,” he says, “have striven to
imitate exactly the celebrated Medusa of the Strozzi
cabinet at Rome, which, nevertheless, is not a
countenance of the highest beauty, an experienced
antiquary will always be able to distinguish the
original from the copy.” The same thing is true,
he says, with respect to the Pallas of Aspasios,
engraved by Natter and others. But this is perfectly
intelligible. The original artist, working after
his own ideas and comprehending thoroughly his own
object, would impart to his creations a flexibility, a
grace, a freedom, not to be reached by one whose
type existed out of his own mind. For even in
literature it is thus—language, malleable, expansive,
obedient to control in the hands of the original
writer, who breathes into it his own ideas and requires
it only to drape them, becomes a stiff unmanageable
mass with the imitator like a corpse put
in motion by galvanism.
To be conversant with the arts of Greece, is to
move among a race of gods endued with eternal
youth. In the goddesses the small neck, the undeveloped
bosom convey the idea of virgin innocence.
The nipple shrinking inward retreats from
the eye. Over the visage a radiance indescribable
appears to play; the form, whether draped or undraped,
suggests the idea of divine unfleeting existence—of
the poetry of life and love—such as youth
dreams of in its purest aspirations. For the gods our
feelings are in a slight degree different. Zeus, invested
with the majesty of Olympos, in the fulness
of manhood, powerful, beautiful, sublime, awakens in
us a mingling of reverence and love, as towards a
father. Apollo towers like an elder brother above
our heads. Hades, Poseidon, Ares are powers whom
312we do not love. Mighty they were, but strangers
whom our sympathies do not cling to. But Dionysos,
with his vine garland and beautiful face of
friendship, with Eros and Heracles and the heroic
twins and Hephæstos and Seilenos, and the Fauns,
with every haunter of grove, or spring, or mountain
seem familiar all and formed to inspire and
repay affection. They are spirits of joy every one
of them. They have lived from boyhood in our
dreams, they have constituted one principal link in
binding us to the past, one principal argument in
favour of Grecian genius: and who can do otherwise
than love them? Nay, in some measure, when
we consider their manifold escapes from time and
barbarism, they appear to us as Othello to Desdemona—we
“love them for the dangers they have
passed,”—and it asks no faith in miracles to persuade
us that they “love us that we do pity them.”
Winkelmann, who on so many questions connected
with art has put forward opinions highly just and
philosophical, appears to have fallen short of his
wonted acumen in the theory he had formed of the
beauty of the goddesses. His language in fact descends
to puerility where he says:—"Since on the
subject of female beauty there are few observations
to be made, it may be concluded that the
study of it is less complicated and far easier for
the artist. Nature itself appears to experience
less difficulty in the formation of women than of
men, if it be true that there are born fewer boys
than girls."[969] Since the direct contrary is true,
this imaginary difficulty of Nature (not to hazard
a more sacred word) may be dismissed with contempt;
but the remark by which it is ushered in
requires to be confuted. Artists are well aware, and
Winkelmann himself admits, that the beau ideal of
heroic beauty (that for example of Achilles or of
Theseus) is merely the blending of feminine loveliness
313with masculine power, so as to leave it undetermined,
from the countenance, to which sex it belongs. And
still the beauty of the Grecian youth, where they
are beautiful, consists in a near approach to that of
the female, so near indeed that they might be easily
mistaken for women. If, therefore, the beauty of
men when highest and most perfect, consists chiefly
in what it borrows from that of woman, the latter
necessarily constitutes the apex of human beauty;
and the artist whom this conviction guides in his
creations, will be the first to rival the great masters
of antiquity. Another observation which it is
strange to find in the Historian of Art, is that artists
draped their female figures because of the little difficulty
there is in imitating the naked form. But
was it the extreme facility of representing paternal
grief that led Timanthes to veil the face of his
Agamemnon? In draping their goddesses and heroines,
artists were guided by other reasons, of which
the principal was their desire to conform to the
ideas of the poets and to popular belief.
314
From the arts the transition is natural to the
literature[970] of Greece, which in the historical period
necessarily constituted the principal agent in ripening
and stamping their peculiar character upon the
fruits of education among the people. Literature
is in fact the school-mistress of nations. In it so
long as it remains entire, we may contemplate the
whole character, intellectual and moral, of the race
out of whose passions, yearnings, tastes, and energies
it may be said to be fashioned. And this, true
of all literature, is especially applicable to that of
Greece, which more than any other bears the impress
of nationality. Every idea, every image, every
maxim, every reflection seems to emanate from one
source. Nothing is foreign. Neither the inspiration,
nor the spirit which regulated it and moulded
it into beauty, borrowed a single impulse from anything
existing beyond the circle of Hellenic thought.
Greece supplied at once the matrix and the materials,
the active power and that delicate sense of
beauty and perfection which presided over its organisation
and rendered it the delight of mankind.
In characterising this literature many singular notions
have been broached. We have been told that
315its spirit is exclusively masculine, which means, of
course, that while it abounds with strength and energy,
with sublimity of speculation and impassioned
and impetuous impulses, it is wanting in that sweetness,
delicacy, grace, and tenderness which confer
on the intellectual offspring of some modern nations
a feminine aspect. Grecian literature, however, is
neither masculine nor feminine, but androgynous like
the son of Aphrodite and Hermes. There is no excellence
of thought or language, of which, even in
its present fragmentary state, it does not offer us
some example. There is a predominance, doubtless,
of stern grandeur and colossal elevation of thought;
but, beside these, we discover frequently modifications
of light and airy beauty, infantine purity of
sentiment, ease, grace, felicitous negligence, and a
dreamy luxury of speculation not to be outdone by
the most subtile and fanciful literature existing. If
there be a deficiency of any thing, it is of spirituality.
The imagination of the Greeks confined itself
too rigidly perhaps to this “bank and shoal of time.”
Not being able to lift the veil which curtains the
realms beyond the grave, it busied itself too little
about those things with which the disembodied soul
must converse for ever. In most Greek writers
there is a visible reluctance to walk amid the forms
of Hades. Their fancy will not be conducted beyond
the limits of the visible universe, but shudders,
rears and reverts its eyes towards the light where
alone it finds firm footing for speculation. But on
the other hand if it refuse to quit this earthly scene
of existence, how glorious is the flood of sunshine
and splendour which it pours over it! It is in
these walks of literature that we discover truly the
freshness and the loveliness of morning. The very
clouds that hover over the landscape only add to its
majesty, by diversifying the prospect and introducing
those shadows and contrasts which the mind delights
everywhere to discover.
316Poets,[971] it is constantly repeated, commence in
every country the mental movement which evolves
civilisation out of the chaos of barbarism; but it remains
a mystery how and by what they themselves
are moved. There may possibly be something more
than a figure of speech in the old affirmation that
they were inspired of heaven. Their imagination
towered to so great a height that it was kindled by
the lamps of the firmament, and may be regarded
as that fabled Prometheus who applied the flame
of science to the human clay. I do not therefore
see what objection can be urged against our maintaining
the old doctrine that poets partook and partake
still, when their minds are pure, of a divine
impulse—that to the infant nations of the earth they
were teachers commissioned from on high.
The condition of the mind in those early ages
when poets were the only oracles, it is difficult for
men surfeited with the luxuries of a prolific literature
to comprehend. Among the Arabs of the desert
we may still perhaps discover something similar.
Deprived of books, but enjoying much leisure, they
eagerly treasure up in their memories the moral
distich, the apologue, the tale which instructs while
it delights, and thus mentally furnished with a few
weapons they are often wiser in deliberation, more
persuasive in discourse, more ready in action than
persons of education in civilised countries, whose intellectual
armoury is so full that in the moment of
danger they know not what weapon to choose. Poets,
among such a race and under such circumstances,
feel that they have a high mission to fulfil; their
endeavours are not by polished rhythmical trifles to
amuse a few rich and noble persons, but to clothe in
befitting language and marry to immortal verse those
317great central truths, upon which the whole system
of the future world of civilisation must revolve. We
find them always curiously adapting their revelations
to the times. First, the great fundamental truths
of religion, the basis of the social structure, are infused
into the public mind. Next the rudiments of
politics and legislation, the precepts of agriculture,
the leading rules of the useful arts, the observances
of civil life, and the first faint whispers of the passions
and affections are treasured up in their lays.
Then, growing bolder by degrees, they aim at subduing
the whole empire of knowledge, and impetuously,
with numerous charms and allurements, hurry
mankind forward in a sort of orgiastic rapture to
the very threshold of philosophy.
Among the earliest names in the literary traditions
of Hellas are those of Olen, Pamphos, Musæos
and Orpheus,[972] who, for their wisdom, are said to be
sprung from the gods. They were sacred bards,
whose genius obtained for them an ascendency over
the minds of their countrymen. Yet all they attempted,
perhaps, was to teach the doctrine of prayer,
thanksgiving, sacrifice, which, being afterwards misunderstood,
caused them to be confounded with those
impostors and incantation-mongers, who, in more recent
times, granted absolutions and sold indulgences
both to individuals and states, with a hardihood
worthy of Giovanni di Medici. Musæos, older probably
than Orpheus, though sometimes regarded as
his disciple, is said by certain traditions to have been
a teacher of ethics, who delivered a body of moral
precepts in four thousand verses. His country is
unknown,—for he is now represented as an Athenian,
now as a Thracian,—but his name and the name of
Orpheus and Eumolpos are associated with the expiations,
orgies, mysteries, celebrated during many
318ages in honour of Demeter and Dionysos.[973] We must
rest content, however, with very imperfect notions
of what they were, for, in looking back at these
great men, whom we behold on the edge of the
horizon, enlarged like the sun at its setting by
misty exhalations, but by the same means rendered
dim and obscure, we can form no just idea of their
character.
These, however, and such as these, were the men
who fabricated the first link in that chain of thought
and beauty, which, stretching over the gulf of time
and fastened to the skies, still holds up the nations
of the earth from sinking into barbarism. Literature
is degraded when contemplated as an art or
as an amusement. It is a paradise, into which the
best fruits of the soul, when arrived at their greatest
maturity and beauty, are transplanted to bloom in
immortal freshness and fragrance. It is the garner
wherein the seeds of religion, virtue, morals, national
greatness and individual happiness are preserved for
the use of humanity. It is a gallery, where the likenesses
of all the great and noble souls who have shed
light and glory on the earth, are treasured up as the
heirloom and palladium of the human race. It is
impossible, therefore, for any but the most sordid
minds to look back towards the venerable fathers
of literature without a deep thrill of filial reverence
and love, conjoined with the generous impulse and
yearning desire to enlarge and add fresh brightness
to the halo which encircles their names. They were
not, what since too many have been, the instruments
and panders to the pleasures of worldlings. Conscious
of the holy mission wherewith, according to
their creed, the father of gods and men had intrusted
them, they stood forward as the apostles of truth,
encircled by the majesty which a sense of divine
inspiration must impart. They felt a harmony within
319their souls which, in manifesting itself, sought the
aid of harmonious language; and hence the precepts
of wisdom, distilling from their lips like honey from
the honeycomb, moulded themselves naturally into
verse, at whose sound the fountains of the great deep
of knowledge were broken up, and the windows of
heaven opened, and a deluge of philosophy and science
and intellectual delight poured forth upon the
amazed world.
In what age or province of Greece arose the first
minister of this poetical revelation, it is not now possible
to decide. The art of writing, however, which
the Egyptian king regarded as the enemy of memory,
had not passed the Ægæan. The songs men heard were
wafted on the wings of music from tongue to tongue,
and, by degrees, the professors of this marvellous art,
by which the wisdom and the glory of the past were
embalmed in the sweets of verse, embodied themselves
into a distinct order called Aoidoi or Singers.[974] The
life of these men in the remote ages of antiquity is
little known to us. Wanderers, however, for the most
part they were, in some respects not unlike the Jongleurs
and Troubadours of the middle ages, though
occupying a higher station and guided by a higher
aim. Their first and ostensible object was, doubtless,
to delight; but it is of great importance to inspire
men with a delight in lofty and ennobling conceptions,—to
withdraw them for a moment from pursuits sordid
or brutalising or unmanly, to the contemplation
of heroic acts,—of honour, of patriotism, of friendship,—of
the great and solid advantages accruing from
peace and commerce, and the experience of travel and
adversity.
What were the rewards they obtained it is easy to
conjecture. They consisted, principally, in the rays of
joy reflected back upon them by a thousand happy
countenances at once. Gain they neither would nor
could regard. He who renders multitudes wise and
320happy must be happy and wise himself; and wisdom
scorns to measure its gifts against gold. The truly
wise and great man, therefore, if fortune have originally
befriended him, will shower his benefactions, as
God his rain, liberally and without distinction upon all;
and if necessity compel him to receive some return,
his moderation will content itself with the least possible
amount. Embraced within the circle of refinement
which they themselves had created, however,
they gradually became secularised, though we must be
careful to distinguish them from their successors of a
later age. The prodigious admiration which they and
their songs excited may be learned from those passages
in Homer where Phemios and Demodocos are introduced,
and from that animated dialogue of Plato, in
which the rhapsodist Ion describes his office and his
audience. It has been justly remarked, that if this
man, a mere actor, could hurry into whatever channel
he pleased the affections of a whole theatre, melt them
into tears, fire them with indignation, or clothe their
countenances with the smiles of joy, much more would
the poets themselves work upon their passions by an
art far nearer nature.
Care must, no doubt, be taken not to confound the
Rhapsodists with the Aoidoi who preceded them,
though it be certain that the manners and condition
of the later race may serve to throw considerable light
on those of the earlier. Both have recently much
occupied the attention of the learned; and Wolff in
particular deserves credit for his defence of the Rhapsodists,
into which, however, he was chiefly led by the
requirements of his celebrated theory. They were certainly,
at first, a remarkable order of men, whom it
would be injurious to confound with their frivolous
representatives in the age of Plato and Xenophon.
Nevertheless, the above distinguished scholar is perhaps
inclined to exaggerate their merits, since to them,
in his opinion, we owe it that the great Homeric
poems have come down to us. But this is taking for
granted the matter in dispute between him and his
321opponents, who maintain that the author of the Iliad
and Odyssey possessed both the knowledge and the
materials for writing. He, with reason however, assumes
that both theatrical and oratorical action found
a way opened for them by the rhapsodic art, though its
professors were neither actors nor orators, but men
exercising an office connected with a peculiar state of
society, and no longer existing in modern times.
It has often been supposed, grounding the opinion
on a false interpretation of the word rhapsodist, that
the members of this fraternity were mere compilers or
patchers up of poems from fragments pilfered out of
various authors. And, to augment the absurdity, the
practice of a recent age has been attributed to remote
antiquity, when, as some imagine, the great rhapsodists
like a modern lecturer, carried about with them pictures
of the subject they were upon, and pointed out
to the audience with a stick[975] the various characters
or incidents they might be describing. Another error
much insisted on by Wolff, is the supposition that the
Homeric poems alone were chanted by the older
Rhapsodists, which no doubt is contrary to the testimony
of antiquity and to common sense. For, as
might naturally be concluded, not only the songs of
Hesiod[976] and the whole epic race were thus publicly
sung, but those likewise of the lyric and iambic poets,
and the very laws of the state when the legislator
happened to have composed them in verse. It must
nevertheless be remarked, (though of this Wolff takes
no notice,) that so much did recitations of Homer’s
works predominate over all others, that Rhapsodists
and Homerists were often regarded as synonymous
322terms;[977] and even in later ages, when at any rate the
art of writing was not unknown, Demetrius Phalereus
introduced upon the stage a class of reciters, who,
down to the days of Athenæus, enjoyed the name of
Homerists. Still, as I have observed above, the works
of other good poets were at times recited, as Hesiod,
Archilochos, Mimnermos, and Phocylides. Nay, the
Rhapsodist Mnasion, as Lysanias relates, used to recite
the Iambics of Simonides; Cleomenes, the Purifications
of Empedocles, and Hegesius the comedian,
the Histories of Herodotus; that is, some portions of
them I presume. Certain authors delivered their own
productions in this way,[978] as Xenophanes, who composed
both epics, elegies and iambics.[979]
It has with reason been observed that although the
name of the rhapsodic art would seem to have been
invented posterior to Homer, the thing itself existed
long before, and was held in greater honour than at
any subsequent period. In fact, the poets of those
times were themselves Rhapsodists, and for many ages
the only ones, if it be true that Hesiod[980] was the first
who reduced the chanting of other men’s poems into
an art. Afterwards, from the age of Terpander the
Lesbian (Olymp. 34) down to Cynæthos of Chios
(Olymp. 69) supposed to have been the author of the
Homeric Hymn to Apollo, and a man of distinguished
genius, the Rhapsodists sometimes chanted the poems
of others, sometimes their own, and occasionally perhaps
interpolated new verses into the golden relics of
the past, as our modern actors often foist their one-legged
jokes into the stage text of Shakespeare. There
appears, however, to be no foundation for the notion,
that nearly every one of these chanters was likewise a
clever poet, which no ancient writer, I believe, asserts,
and which the assertions of fifty would not render
323credible, though the probability is, that of those numerous
rhapsodists some were themselves poets, and
others desirous, without the genius, of being thought
such; so that it is quite as likely that their vanity
frequently laid claim to the works of others, where detection
could be escaped, as that others were suffered
to rob them of their just fame.
They who contend for the flourishing of the system
of castes in Greece, would probably maintain that
the Rhapsodists constituted from the first a clan, as
the Homeridæ are said to have been in Chios.[981]
Among the few arts which commanded the undivided
time and study of numerous professors in
those ages, that of the Aoidos or Poet, was certainly
one, and that, too, the most honoured and revered.
Doubtless their characters were pure and noble, to
overcome the envy which superior abilities usually
inspire. For whether at home or abroad, in their
native cities no less than in the public assemblies,
and at the festive boards of kings, they were regarded
as dear to gods and venerable to men. The Rhapsodists
likewise enjoyed the same estimation and led
the same kind of life until other studies and other
manners, with that most debasing of all passions, the
love of gain, brought contempt on their profession
and pursuits.[982]
In the Homeric poems themselves we discover
abundant proofs of the high honour in which the
professors of the poetical art were held by their
countrymen. They fulfilled in Greece[983] the office
performed among the Hebrews by the Schools of the
Prophets,[984] or the solitary possessors of the vaticinatory
power who revealed to their countrymen the will of
heaven, and taught by what practices it might be
propitiated. Some institution of this kind probably
existed, as I have already observed, from the very dawn
324of civilisation which it principally created. Most
princes, like Agamemnon, Alcinoüs and Odysseus,
retained in their palaces a man at once their chaplain
and their laureate, who, when guests foreign or
domestic assembled at their board, might administer
instruction and delight, by chanting the praises of
the gods, the exploits or greatness of their ancestors,
or even by delivering precepts in morals or the
useful arts. To a poet, also, as to the holiest of
guardians, kings entrusted the care of their wives and
families,[985] when departing on distant expeditions; and
so great was the veneration paid to their character,
that we find Clytemnæstra banishing the poet before
she dares to become the paramour of Ægisthos.
But those men of great original genius whose fame
spread rapidly, and who probably found superior
enjoyment in the independence of a wandering life,
not content with the patronage of a single prince, or
the admiration of a single people, moved perpetually
from land to land, enhancing at once their glory and
experience. We in fact discover in Homer, Pindar,
and other original poets proofs that the flowers from
which they collected the honey of their melodies
grew not all on one spot. Odysseus was a type of
the bard who sang his adventures, and looking still
further back we find the Thracian Thamyris, whom
the Muses were said to have punished for his vanity,
penetrating into the obscurest parts of Peloponnesos,
325protected by the sanctity of his character and the
reverence due to his profession.[986]
With respect to Homer, both ancient tradition and
the form and spirit of his poems, require us to consider
him in this light, though there is no ground for
supposing him with Payne Knight to have celebrated
the different heroes of Greece for the purpose of
ingratiating himself with their descendants.
Those writers who imagine the works of Homer
to have been composed fortuitously by a club of poets,
all actuated by a blind instinct to produce a number
of parts which, when completed, should fit as well together
as the several members of a statue, are necessarily
desirous to establish two points: first, that
the Aoidoi recited their works from memory, and that
because, secondly, the art of writing was unknown.
By far too much ingenuity has already been expended
on this question to allow it to be any longer tempting
from its novelty. Wolff and Heyne have obtained
all the credit they sought by their visionary hypothesis,
and the echoes of their scepticism are not
yet silenced in the academies and universities. The
argument, derived from the practice of the Rhapsodists,
of repeating from memory, is attended by two
inconveniences: first, it cannot be shown that the
order arose before the art of writing was common;
second, these recitations were equally made from memory,
not only in the age of Pericles, but down to
the latest period of their flourishing. It may, therefore,
without the slightest risk to the argument, be
granted the academic sceptics that the Rhapsodists
recited from memory, even when we know with certainty
that they learned the poems from written
copies.
To render more credible the notion that the art
of writing in the age of Homer was not yet known,
great stress is laid on the powers of memory in
certain individuals, though from these nothing can
326in reality be inferred, except, that when necessary,
men can certainly remember a great deal. It matters
little, however, for my present purpose, whether the
Iliad and Odyssey were written by one man or by
a hundred; the grandeur of the poetry remains, and
to it as a great fountain-head may be traced several
principal streams of Hellenic civilisation.
Plato, indeed, who laboured so assiduously in enlarging
the empire and corroborating the powers of
the human understanding, at times maintained the
fancy that little benefit had been conferred on Greece
by her bard. He observes, but in a manner so ironical
that it is difficult to determine his meaning, that
if Homer and Hesiod had possessed the gift of improving
their contemporaries in virtue they would
never have been suffered to wander about chanting
their poems. People, he thinks, would have constrained
them by benefits to remain with them, or,
not succeeding in this, would have quitted their homes
to attend their footsteps, as in his age many did in
the case of the sophists.[987]
At the same time he admits the general opinion
to have been that Homer was the great preceptor
of Hellas, who taught the sciences of politics and
ethics, together with the whole discipline and economy
of human life.[988] Perhaps, notwithstanding his
great wisdom and his genius, he looked upon the
question from a wrong point of view, regarding
poetry as the rival rather than the precursor of
philosophy. The mission of the former had, however,
in his time been in a great measure accomplished,
as far, I mean, as concerned positive teaching;
and he did not consider that as civilisation
advances and materialises nations the curb of poetry
is the more required to check their downward tendencies,
and direct their head towards the skies.
The object of poetry is to keep alive in the human
327breast the love of whatever is noble and beautiful,
to dazzle the worldling from the worship of gold
by showing him something more glorious than anything
that gold can purchase, to accomplish the
apotheosis of pure affection, of virtue, of disinterestedness,
of great passions, of patriotism,—and in
Homer all this is effected with a spontaneous energy,
which like the ocean appears equal to bear the whole
weight of humanity clothed with all its attributes
upon its breast.
Greece has no poet worthy to be compared with our
Shakespeare and our Milton but Homer, who possesses
some advantages over them both. Shakespeare, buoyant
and full of life as was his spirit, felt evidently
the waves of his imagination lapse at times from
about him and leave his mind stranded and bare
on the shores of the immeasurable universe. Melancholy
creeps over him, like a black vapour, concealing
the Titanian head wont to tower above the
region of the clouds. Even over Milton’s soul, serene
in its fiery brightness as it usually is, I think
I discover something which at times obscures his
faith in himself and human nature, and produces a
flagging of the fancy. But in Homer this never appears.
Cheerfully and joyously he pursues his course
with eternal sunshine on his brow, and a heart beating
full and true, as if the life of all the world were
within him. There is no end of his vitality. He
seems as if he could never grow old. His strength
is inexhaustible. Equal to whatever may happen,
he nowhere seems to be hurried by his subject, or
compelled to strain a nerve to accomplish what he
desires. In himself he appears happy as a god, and
only to sympathise in human suffering from the boundlessness
of his charity. He comes forth as the sun in
the morning, full of brightness, showing all the tears
that sprinkle the earth and drying them too, but shedding
none. We call him old, though in reality he
is all youthfulness and love. Every function of life
328goes on harmoniously in his frame. He enjoys whatever
nature brings within the circle of his experience.
He drinks in with rapture the freshness of
dawn,—basks smilingly in the blaze of noon,—welcomes
the stillness of evening—the solemn grandeur
of night. Sleep, too, has for him inexpressible
charms, and on the pleasures we taste among its
bowers he has bestowed every grateful, every endearing
epithet. Milton is far more spiritual, and careers
in a course nearer the stars. Shakespeare, in his
metaphysical subtlety and yearning to pierce beyond
the grave, suggests stranger thoughts, and calls up
a wilder world of fancies. But Homer, as if admitted
behind the veil, never doubts for a moment.
Habitually, too, his thoughts are of action, of man
as he is, of the virtue of the citizen, of the soldier,
of the husband, of the father, of the son, of the wife.
He loved the world and all that it contains. His
eye could detect beauty where the atrabilious sceptic
beholds nothing but deformity.
Hence the universal fame and admiration of his
writings. For, wherever a well-spring of delight
exists, the world will discover it and have recourse
to it for ever. The tragic poets who took up his
mantle differed widely from him both in temper and
character. The experiment of civilisation had been
tried, and been the cause of less happiness than at
the outset it seemed to promise. A spirit of dissatisfaction
had consequently grown up in society, which,
shaken by convulsions within and assaulted from without
by storms, appeared to be fast resolving into its
original elements. Upon the minds of the tragic
poets there accordingly fell a gloomy shadow. They
looked backwards and around them, and were saddened
by the view of terrible pictures which the
dark pencil of Fate was constantly filling up. The
inexplicable influence of events upon the inner organisation
of man had caused them too, and their
contemporaries equally, to delight in gloom, in slaughter,
in revenge, in exhibitions of suffering, analogous
329in many cases to what they beheld their countrymen
inflict upon each other.
Observe the creations of Æschylus:[989] in them, pregnant
all with Miltonic haughtiness, energy, grandeur,
we already discover symptoms of profound discontent
with the character of actual existence and an invincible
yearning towards the past. He seemed desirous
to haunt the imaginations of his contemporaries with
gigantic phantoms, quarried out of the wrecks of a
vanished ethical system, in which such greatness
found congeniality and sympathy. His ideas seemed
to clothe themselves spontaneously in language of
massive structure, like a Cyclopean wall, such as before
or since no man ever used. He projected himself
by the force of meditation into the heroic spheres,
conversed there with mighty shades, acquired among
them stern principles of action, of thought, of belief,
of composition; and with these he sought to inspire
the men of his own time. His object seems less to
delight than to overawe, to persuade than to command.
His ideas move along the highest arch of
imagination which spans the universe from pole to
pole, or rise out of a sea of darkness which they
illuminate for a moment like lightning flashes in their
passage.
All Æschylus’s more marked characters come before
us invested with marvellous attributes, and their
voices awake a thrilling mysterious echo in the
depths of the soul. Prometheus, for example,—who
or what in poetry is like him? Some features
of resemblance he may have to the Satan of “Paradise
Lost,” but only in his indomitable energy, in his
unconquerable will; in all other respects he stands
differenced from that “archangel ruined” by qualities
the most remarkable. Towards mankind he appears
330in the relation of supreme love. For their sake
alone he braves the anger of Zeus, who, in the tempest
of vengeance which he pours upon the naked
form of this beneficent god, is presented to the mind
as a tyrannical oppressor. Again, in the Erinnyes,
what mysterious phantoms does he conjure up! The
whole scene, where black and blood-dripping they
rise before the fancy in the shrine of Delphi, is, beyond
imagination, awe-inspiring and sublime. Like
Orestes himself, the fancy is haunted, as we read, by
an uneasy consciousness of their presence. They
appear like the summits of the infernal world, thrust
up visibly into the world of reality. They are frightful
dreams endued with form and vitality, and walking
abroad to scare us even while waking. Never
did faith in visionary beings equal in strength the
faith which he constrains us to have in these his
creations. The scent of blood fills the nostrils as
we read. We pant,—we shudder,—we expect to hear
their footsteps on the carpet behind us. Nevertheless
the effect of Æschylus’ poetry is not, like Byron’s,
to humiliate or depress. On the contrary, it imparts
to us its energy as we read. It fills,—it expands,—it
aggrandises,—it elevates the mind.
Sophocles presents us with a wholly different
type of genius. His conceptions, without being gigantic,
are still great, and have a richness and roundness
something like the form of woman. To him,
as to Raffaelle, the world appeared pregnant on all
sides with beauty. Yet, there was a vein of pensiveness
in his fancy which, running through all his
works, imparts to them a witchery independent of
the amount of intellect displayed. He never, like
Æschylus, transports us into the dim twilight of
mythology amidst the nodding ruins of systems and
creeds. However antique may be the subject which
he treats, his invention gives it completeness, and he
brings it out fresh, glossy, distinct, and beautiful as
the creations of to-day. Æschylus carries us back
to the past, Sophocles brings the past forward to us.
331By a vigorous exertion of genius he breathes life
into things dead; melts away from about them by
his warm touch the hoar of antiquity; fills up the
outline; freshens the colours; converts them into contemporary
existencies. All his sympathies, healthy
and true, cling to the things around him: the religion,
the form of polity, the climate, the soil of
Attica, invested with the beauty which they assumed
in his plastic vision, satisfied his desires. What he
found not in realities he bestowed upon them. He
idealised his contemporaries. His poetry is sunny
as the Ægæan in spring, and a breeze as healthful
and refreshing breathes over it. Like the nightingale,
whose music he loved, it comes to us full of forgotten
harmonies, re-awakening all the associations, all
the delights, all the hopes and aspirations of youth.
Sweet and musical, and replete with tenderness, are
his marvellous chorusses. They burst upon the heart
like the first note of the cuckoo[990] in the depths of a
forest, curling round the mossy trunks of the meditative
old trees upon the ear.
And then his female characters, in which above all
things he excels. Not Imogen herself, whose breath
like violets perfumes the page of Shakespeare, rises
before us a more exquisite vision than Antigone,
in her maiden purity, her unfathomable tenderness,
her holy affection, filial and fraternal. Even Œdipos,
supported and led into the light by such a daughter,
appears glorious as a god, his involuntary stains
worked off by years of suffering, his reverend old age
garlanded by calamity, wreathed with the tendrils
and snowy blossoms of a daughter’s love. And Tecmessa,
does she not seem to be Desdemona ripened
into a mother? There is no poet who has pourtrayed
a wife of more unmingled gentleness, or who
has better sounded the depths of a mother’s heart.
Her affection expands like an atmosphere round the
332boy Eurysaces, menaced at once by treacherous enemies
and by his father’s madness, and casts a pure
and bright ray over the sea of blood and stormy
passion and guilt that floats around her. His Dejanira,
likewise, is a character of great beauty; but in
the Clytemnæstra and Electra, in the Chrysothemis
and Ismene, he has been less successful. Among
his male characters Œdipos is the masterpiece. Compounded
of ungovernable passion, a powerful will, a
resolution invincible by suffering, extreme in love
or hate, he stands before us in heroic grandeur, and
like the sun’s orb dilates as he descends beneath
the horizon. Next to him in originality and beauty
are Neoptolemos and Teucer, youths of the greatest
nobleness of soul, who contrast strikingly with his
fox-like Odysseus and the mean-souled imperial
brothers.
To Sophocles succeeds Euripides,[991] whose genius
inspired Milton with the deepest admiration, as it
had before inspired Aristotle. Resembling Sophocles
as little as the latter resembles Æschylus, he
is more deeply imbued than either with the tragic
spirit, interprets more unerringly the language of
passion and the heart, and unlocks more surely the
hidden springs of pity. In him, however, poetry is
less an instinct than an art. His intellect, lofty,
powerful, penetrating, ranged through the most untrodden
paths of nature and philosophy, grasped at
all learning, at all experience, enriched itself with
prodigious stores of reflections, observations, imagery,
over which it possessed the most perfect mastery,
to render them subservient to the purposes of the
drama. Other poets learned in effects, may exhibit
action with no less truth and skill; Euripides dares
to unveil causes, to give the wherefore and the why
333of actions, to descend into the abysses of the mind
and lay bare the curious mechanism, and, so to say,
central fires which produce and ripen our resolutions
and our demeanour.
Without the stern grandeur or the rich physical
imagery of his predecessors, he could more surely
touch the feelings and create an intense interest in
the story of his tragedies. No man, moreover, has
given birth to nobler sentiments. A moral beauty
broods over his scenes; he elevates,—he enlarges,—he
purifies the affections. Truths of greatest importance
make themselves wings of melody in his
verse, and fly across the gulf of two thousand years
from him to us. Above all things, he may almost be
said to have discovered the inexhaustible mine of
love, whence he drew the gold that fashioned the
divine image of Alcestis, the noblest mixture of
earth’s mould that ever bore the name of woman.
It is true this image is but dimly beheld. Perhaps
no genius, not even Shakespeare’s, could have filled
up the outline of unearthly beauty which Euripides
dared to draw. It embodies all the imagination
ever conceived of love. Pure as the celestial Artemis,
impassioned to perfect disinterestedness, all
devotion as a wife, all tenderness as a mother,—content
to die, yet jealous of posthumous love,—sacrificing
everything for her husband’s life, yet haunted
by the fear that death might snap the golden links
of affection, she issues forth like a celestial vision
to take her farewell of the sun. Euripides might
well be proud of this creation. Not Andromache,
not Nausicaa, not even the far-famed consort of
Odysseus can exceed in truth and beauty his conception
of Alcestis. Yet this is the poet whom
Aristophanes had the bad taste to overwhelm with
unceasing ridicule, and whom numerous critics, borrowing
their canons from him, have rashly pronounced
languid and insipid.
Moving on a level below this is the character of
334Electra in the Orestes. In the Alcestis we have rather
the results than the developement of inexpressible
love, which
“raised a mortal to the skies.”
But Electra’s affection unfolds itself before us. There
she watches beside her brother’s bed, contending with
the inexpiable guilt of matricide, sharing his remorse
but comforting him, herself oppressed, yet courageously
bearing up for his sake against the worst
“ills that flesh is heir to.”
With the most supreme delicacy is Polyxena conceived;
and generally, whatever may be said of Euripides’
aversion for the sex, it may be affirmed that no
poet has more ably or more nobly painted the female
character.
Passing next to comedy, of which Aristophanes
must be regarded as the representative, we have a
department of literature peculiar to Greece, for its
comedy resembles that of no other country. It has
never, perhaps, been fairly characterised. They who
take part with the poet against the philosopher exaggerate
his merits: the admirers of Socrates, in revenge
for the unjust death of that great man, generally
undervalue them. Let us endeavour to be just. Aristophanes
was a poet of vast genius, quick to perceive,
and powerful to paint the imperfections, vices, follies,
weaknesses, miseries of man in society. He was greedy,
too, of reputation, in the acquisition of which he spared
neither men nor institutions. The youthful, the gay,
the thoughtless, reckoning laughter and amusement
among the real wants of life, (as to the weak and
frivolous perhaps they are,) he undertook to build his
fame on easing the human character of those moral
excrements which pass off in grinning and mirth.
There is, in fact, a load of small malignity and mischief
in most mental constitutions, which, if not
expelled, might obstruct the healthful play of the
faculties. Mirth is the form it assumes in its exit,
335and comedy is one of the means provided by Nature
for promoting its discharge.
Aristophanes, who comprehended at least this part
of philosophy, found an abundant harvest of follies in
his fellow-citizens. He saw, too, that of all men they
possessed the most inexhaustible good-nature,—to forgive
if they could not profit by the satire which was
directed against themselves. No one could complain
of them on this score. Their risible muscles were at
every man’s service who could coin a joke, or make
faces, or draw a caricature or enact one. Athens was,
in fact, the home of laughter: it was the weak side
of the national character; and never, since merry-making
was invented, did a more skilful manufacturer
of this autochthonal production exist than Aristophanes.
He could make round things square, or straight
crooked; he could invest the noblest and most sacred
things with burlesque and ridicule; he could convert
patriotism into a laughable weakness, genius into puerility,
virtue into a farce. He knew how to make the
brave man (as Lamachos) seem a mere gasconader;
the man of genius (as Euripides) a dealer in rhythmical
jingles; the possessor of highest wisdom and most
unsullied integrity a babbling impostor and a thief.
Such were his prodigious powers. Another excellence
he had, not unakin to the former; he could, when it
suited his purpose, place the most nefarious vices on
the same level with very harmless foibles, so that both
should appear equally laughable or equally odious.
But the Athenians must have been a base people
had these been the qualities which rendered him popular.
They were not: on the contrary, they formed
the great drawback on his reputation. His attack on
Socrates caused the first cast of the Clouds to be
hooted off the stage. But great and crying as were
his delinquencies against morals and philosophy, his
genius triumphed, and he became popular in spite of
them; and in spite of them he has continued to be a
favourite among scholars down to the present day.
No mean amount of creative power could have achieved
336a triumph like this. He possessed, in fact, the quality,
whatever it be, which confers vitality on the offspring
of the mind. Each of his plays, however extravagant
its conceptions, however improbable the plot or wild
the scene or fantastic the characters, still developes a
distinct cycle of existences into which the breath of
everlasting life has been breathed. To every individual
whom he brings upon the stage has been assigned
a distinct type of character, a marked individuality, a
moral and intellectual physiognomy as peculiar to
himself as his mask. No man exhibits greater variety
in a small compass. When he is working out a character
every word tells, and his ease is infinite. Nothing
appears to have proceeded from him in a hurry.
Like the wind, which now rises in gusts, now sinks to
a whisper, but never suggests the idea of weakness,
Aristophanes may trifle, but always because he desires
to trifle.
Moreover, however barren the subject may be, however
rugged, bleak, intractable, he pours over it the
dews of poetry, and clothes it magically with flowers
and verdure. Look at the comedies of the Frogs and
the Birds. By whom but Aristophanes could they
have been rendered tolerable? And yet what marvellous
effects grow out of them in his hands! How
completely is the imagination detached from the
common everyday world, and sent drifting down the
dreamy intoxicating streams of poetry! Not in the
island of Prospero or Philoctetes, not in the savage-encircled
nest of Robinson Crusoe, not in the most
visionary vale that opens before us its serene bosom
in the Arabian Nights, do we breathe more at large,
or more fresh and wholesome air, than among the
fogs and fens of Acheron, or the eternal forests of the
Hoopoo king.
With an art, in which Shakespeare was no mean
proficient, he opens up a more culpable source of interest
in the frequent satire of vices, condemned as
commonly as they are practised. He unveils the
mysteries of iniquity with a fearless and by no means
337an unreluctant hand. No abyss of wickedness was
too dark for his daring muse. He ventured fearlessly
upon themes which few since or before have touched
on, despising contemporary envy and vindictiveness
and the stern condemnation of posterity. To be plain,
he evidently shared in the worst corruptions of his
age, and, like many other satirists, availed himself joyfully
of the mask of satire as an apology for entertaining
his own imagination with the description of them.
No one with the least clearsightedness or candour can
fail to perceive and acknowledge the depraved moral
character of this comic writer. Only less filthy than
Rabelais, his fancy runs riot among the moral jakes and
common sewers of the world, over which, by consummate
art and the matchless magic of his style, he contrives
unhappily to cast a kind of delusive halo, and
to breathe a fragrance which should never be found
but where virtue is.
Upon the subject of his attack on Socrates his defenders
must grant one of two things—that he libelled
him ignorantly, or that he exhibited a degree of
wickedness capable, under other circumstances, of
rising to the enormity of Judas Iscariot. Socrates,
both for genius and for virtue, stands at the head of
the pagan world. He whom Plato admired must have
stood on a higher level than Plato,—that is, have
occupied the apex of mere humanity: and in that
position we find him in the Gorgias, the Republic,
the Euthyphron, and the Phædon. Many charlatans,
since the days of Aristophanes, have endeavoured to
puff upward at him the smoke of their ignorance or
their envy; and from those who tread the mire with
them have for a moment hidden the all but divine
serenity that smiles on humankind from that lofty
and immovable basis where the homage of a world
has placed him; but the next breeze has cleared away
the stinking vapours, and left both him and them
where they were,—the one on the highest, the others
on the lowest step of the ladder which connects human
nature with the skies.
338Upon the dramatic poets whose fragments only remain,
it is in this place unnecessary to dwell. I
therefore pass to the historians and orators, who, no
less vividly than her poets, reflect the genius of
Greece. The first age of prose composition, there
as elsewhere, exhibited the natural characteristics of
dawning art—indecisiveness and timidity. Herodotus,
properly speaking, was her earliest historian, and even
he still walks within the gigantic shadow of epic
fable which stretched far over the civilised and cultivated
ages of Greece, as doth that of Memnon at
dawn over the Theban plains. His character as a
writer is very remarkable. He narrates like a prophet.
His language everywhere bears the impress
and image of the supernatural world wrought into
its very substance. He had formed to himself a
poetical standard of human character and human
action, which accordingly in his work develope themselves
in poetical forms. Long and profound meditation
had spread out the past before him like a
map, on which he could trace every fluctuation in
the stream of events with something like the skill
of a diviner. Men, past or present, may be interpreted
by meditation, if we comprehend the science
of human nature. Herodotus understood much of
this science. Indeed his chief greatness lies in his
wisdom.
Ordinary readers, who are always wiser than their
dead instructors, discovering him to be frankly superstitious,
to have faith in oracles, in dreams, in prodigies,
to chronicle many trivial actions, many trivial
remarks, feel or affect for him a species of contempt.
But they know very little of what is contained in
that vast treasury of epic events. Little do they
suspect with how many great statesmen, generals
and heroic kings the eloquent Halicarnassian could
render them familiar. In his pages alone, perhaps,
do we view in his true proportions that man of men,
Themistocles, who overtops by a head and shoulders
all the other statesmen of the ancient world. There,
339too, may we best discover the character of his contemporaries,
those extraordinary personages who connect
the heroic with the historical period, and constitute
the steps by which we descend from the heights
of mythos and fable to the stern level of realities.
Such an epoch required an historian of peculiar character.
In him were to be united the power to
comprehend poetical motives to action, and the solemn
eloquence fittingly to describe deeds springing
from such a source. Both were found in Herodotus.
He beheld Providence leading man as it were into
the light from the wilderness of mythological times,
still invested with many of his heroic habits and
his forehead beaming with visionary splendours, but
prepared to doff them one by one, and in their stead
to substitute the iron theory and practice of civilisation.
Thucydides, a few years only younger than Herodotus,
found himself placed in the midst of events
the most extraordinary, produced by a system of
civilisation prematurely decaying. Greece had not
been suffered to grow wise and great according to
the laws which usually regulate the ripening of
states. She had been scorched into fruit-bearing
by the fiery conflicts of the Median war; and her
strength thus brought into play, and found to be
great beyond calculation, was immediately by ambitious
statesmen seized upon, parcelled out into lots
which were directed against each other, and thus
exhausted in petty struggles. In Greece we have
an example of a state whose energies, turned inwards,
corroded themselves by concentration; affording
a contrast with Rome whose energies, worked
outward and were gradually weakened and lost by
expansion. The genius of the people begot corresponding
historians. Rome, had its perspicuous ornate,
diffuse, haughty and sublime Livy; Athens
her Thucydides full of poetry indeed, and haughtier
and more sublime, but condensed as an oracle, and
as an oracle obscure.
340Few have measured the greatness of this man.
Ordinary critics missing the ostentatious display of
what is termed philosophy, appear to imagine that
Thucydides is not a philosophical historian, reserving
this praise for Gibbon, Hume, or Voltaire. But
each of these great writers would have contemned
the praise of such persons. Thucydides in historical
writing stands above rivalry or comparison. The
political atmosphere in which he lived, dusky with
thunderclouds and continual storms, his eye could
penetrate through, and discover all the very extraordinary
figures that moved beneath it. Calmly,
from heights of speculation never trodden before,
he contemplated the various groups of generals and
statesmen dispersed over his horizon, pierced through
every disguise into their characters, detected their
motives, unravelled their plots, gave their secret
maxims a tongue, weighed and described their actions
with an impartial sagacity which among historians
belongs to him alone. In this consists his
philosophy. The society, whose developement he
studied, was torn by two antagonist principles—aristocracy
and democracy, whose struggles, undying
in free states, were then more fierce than at any
other period in the history of the world. To enable
his countrymen and posterity to comprehend
the whole chain of events, he opened up a long
vista into the past, to the point at which those
adversaries appeared upon the scene, and threw a
broad light upon all their movements down to the
time when Providence removed him from his post.
His conception of an historian’s duty, somewhat
different from that now entertained, was adopted
by all antiquity, in which every succeeding writer
bore testimony to his superiority by imitating him.
He thought it not enough to narrate and describe,
but, throwing open the council chamber and stilling
the tumultuous agora, he brings the living statesman
or demagogue upon the stage, developing in
our hearing his views, his conceptions of surrounding
341circumstances and characters, his projects, his
means for accomplishing them. That the speeches
found in his history were actually in that form delivered,
I will by no means affirm. He probably
obtained but the substance from report, and himself
clothed it in those vivid expressions which two
thousand years have not stripped of their freshness.
Nevertheless, the more trifling the amount of what
he owed to the relations of others, the greater must
appear his genius, his unerring sense of fitness, his
dramatic power of projecting himself successively
into a whole gallery of characters, and truly interpreting
the opinions, maxims, feelings of each; for
no one pretends that he has ever misrepresented
a single individual. And if those speeches be examined
on the score of eloquence, whether of thought
or language, it will I think be found, that in almost
every excellence they may rank with those of Demosthenes.
In each a peculiar economy is observed
in the management of the arguments, in the sentiments,
in the opinions, in the logical tone, in the
manifestations of individuality which diffuse themselves
over the whole and give a colour to it.
The defects—for such there are—resolve themselves
into a certain magisterial air, indicating a
consciousness of superiority, sure, more or less, to
offend in all cases, and a certain imperspicuity of
style arising principally from the loose manner in
which the drapery of language is flung over his
ideas, which is chiefly observable in the orations, his
narrative for the most part being free from this imperfection.
Besides, whatever be the series of facts
he relates, their importance appears to be enhanced
by his manner of handling them. He casts aside,
as unworthy both of himself and the reader, whatever
is of inferior moment. These, in fact, the
mere chaff of human affairs, only cling round the
grain of action to conceal it, and must be blown
aside by the reader if the historian neglect to do it.
The circumstances of the times conferred upon
342his subject all the interest and the gloom of tragedy.
But it thus suited him the better. His genius delighted
in terrible pictures: battles, plagues, earthquakes,
general massacres, the storming of cities, the
annihilation of great armies. His fancy vividly realised
all,—the plague-tumbril rumbling, choked with
dead, towards the sepulchral suburbs,—the streets of
Corcyra streaming alternately with democratic and
aristocratic blood,—the expected slaughter of Mitylene,—the
reality at Melos,—two thousand Helots
cut off by the perfidy of Sparta,—the butchery at
Platæa,—at Skione,—in Sicily! Through all these
scenes we are precipitated forward, shuddering, compassionating,
detesting by turns. But we are neither
overwhelmed nor inspired with disgust for human
nature. Our sympathies cling closer and closer to
the historian, who spares no villany, gratifies no malice,
tramples on no noble principle, succumbs to
no temptation of partiality. Faithful to his trust he
deals forth truth to all, to none the slightest flattery.
Not even for his country will he lie. It was she, in
fact, with her heroic ethics and grandeur of sentiment,
that had taught him his high principles, and
he repaid her by recording all her errors, all her
wrongs, all her imperfections: in which he acted like
a great and a wise man. He would have sacrificed
for her his life,—he would not sacrifice his conscience.
To him succeeds Xenophon, a writer whom it is
difficult to characterise. There was in the temper
of his mind something parasitical, which led him to
lean on others for support,—on Socrates, on Cyrus,
on Agesilaos. Incapable of acting in a republic the
part of a good citizen, he would have been that rare
thing—a virtuous courtier. From this the tone of
his writings may be conjectured. Almost everywhere
we discover a degree of gentleness, sweetness,
modesty, which steals imperceptibly into the heart,
and creates the impression that he was a man highly
amiable and upright. His piety, likewise, causes
343itself to be felt. He never mentions the gods but
with due reverence, exhibits a strong reliance upon
Providence, and, according to his best apprehensions,
justifies its ways to men with earnest solicitude. The
style of his composition, necessarily harmonising with
the qualities of his mind, is full of suavity, polished
elegance, gentlemanliness, bonhomie, the very characteristics
of a popular writer. Readers of moderate
understanding can everywhere perceive his drift,
can accompany him without feeling out of breath.
He is communicative, sensible, rational, indulges in
no cloudy flights, never dives out of sight in the
ocean of speculation.
Xenophon, however, misunderstood himself when
he conceived that it was for him to continue the
history of Thucydides. It was as if Andrea del Sarto
had undertaken to complete a picture left in parts
unfinished by Michael Angelo. He had neither the
penetrating sagacity necessary to comprehend the internal
plan of the picture, the vivifying energy to
preserve the intense tragedy of the action, nor the
colours to harmonise with what he found painted.
Still, considered by himself, he has great merits.
Several scenes in his history, the trial, for example,
of the generals, the death of Theramenes, the battles
on the Hellespont, exhibit a force of conception and
a scope and flexibility of style uncommon in any
literature; and the Anabasis, without comparison his
greatest work, reads like a chronicle of the most
chivalrous knight-errantry. The attempt, however
flagitious on the part of Cyrus, had the merit of
extreme boldness.boldness. It was the model expedition
which disclosed the secret of Asia to Alexander,
and showed with how little danger its vast empires
might be shattered to pieces. Xenophon who, young
and adventurous, accompanied the Persian prince and
the heroic mercenaries in his pay, contemplated with
delight the physical aspect of the East, its luxurious
population, its roving tribes, with the triumphs of
his disciplined and warlike countrymen over innumerable
344barbarian hosts. This we discover from the
interest and animation of his narrative, in which stern
realities exceed in grandeur and wildness the creations
of romance. But it is equally clear that he did
not fully comprehend the moral of the scene. For,
otherwise, he could never, with these facts before
him, have endeavoured by his Cyropædia, to recommend
to his countrymen those institutions which
rendered Persia, with all its wealth, a constant prey
to the small republics of Greece.
Of the other writings of Xenophon little need be
said: they are the parsley and the rue of Greek literature,
bordering and adorning its entrance, and therefore
beheld of all. But most of these have their
beauty. Even in the hunting treatise, amid the
breeding of dogs, and nets, and knives, and boar-spears,
and the slaughter of animals, we catch
glimpses of better things,—of glades where the hare
frolics by moonlight, and grassy uplands, dewy and
fragrant, where does, poetical as she of Rylstone,
lead forth their fawns at break of day. The treatises
on the states of Athens and Sparta have, I trust,
been falsely attributed to this able and accomplished
writer. They are contemptible productions, conceived
in the spirit of a servile flatterer of the Dorians,
and of a satirist, equally servile and stupid, of the
greater and infinitely more intellectual Ionic race.
I pass over the historians known to us only by
a few scanty fragments, that I may at once come
to the orators, the peculiar ornament and pride of
Greece, whose greatest statesmen were equally great
as speakers, more especially at Athens, where, as an
art, eloquence was most assiduously cultivated, and
achieved its greatest triumphs. Tradition attributes
to Themistocles, to Pericles, to Alcibiades consummate
skill in guiding the currents of human sympathy,
and a sense of their glory lingered on the
high places of society like sunshine on the Alps
long after they had quitted the world. But as
they did not augment the stores of their country’s
345literature, we can have nothing to speak of them
here. The orators whose fragments time has been
unable to destroy are however sufficient, if not to
satiate our thirst of admiration, at least to show,
by the grandeur of their proportions, how great and
glorious Attic eloquence, when entire, must have been.
More than any other department of literature it is
the growth of patience and toil. A man may be
born with the instincts of eloquence,—fancy, constitutional
fire, vehemence,—but unless these instincts
be broken in and trained by consummate art, nature
will in vain have bestowed her gifts. These truths
were early understood at Athens. It was perceived
that without eloquence political distinction was unattainable,
and therefore all who aspired to
“wield at will that fierce democracy,”
subjected themselves to a course of laborious study,
to which our more phlegmatic natures would not
submit.
The results we may, in part, still contemplate in
that body of Athenian oratory, which to the author
and the statesman is in itself a library. Every legitimate
form of eloquence is there beheld. In Antiphon
and Andocides it appears in rough simplicity,
employing contrivance and art, but employing them
awkwardly. Lysias makes considerable advances beyond
them, clothes his style with grace, constructs
his narrative with extraordinary skill, and moves the
passions by considerable pathos. Isocrates it is common
with the moderns, who echo one another, to underrate:
their delicate ears, offended by his too nicely
balanced periods, his antitheses, his monotonous cadences,
refuse to relish that stately harmony, and
majestic flow of language, which recommend the
thoughts of this “old man eloquent,” whose greatest
panegyric is pronounced by Plato[992] in the Phædros.
346In Isæos we have an argumentative, able pleader;
in Deinarchos a vigorous accuser; in Demades the
power of splendid improvisation; in Lycurgus noble
sentiments clothed in poetical language, haughty patriotism,
the rough virtues of a stoic; in Æschines
an union of magnificent style, thoughts full of weight,
admirable arrangement, warmth, vivacity, wit. Yet
Demosthenes soars far above Æschines,—far above
all. On him nature had bestowed every quality
which constitutes an ingredient of eloquence,—originality,
love of labour, a clear head, a warm heart, a
judgment all but unerring, with an impetuous vehemence
perfectly irresistible.
A very extraordinary impression is created by the
study of this writer. He seems never to put forth
all his strength. You see him, indeed, bear down
every thing before him, overwhelming the arguments
and the gold of Philip, crushing his rivals, annihilating
his enemies; but the persuasion rests with you
that he could have done more. You discover amid
the waves and foam of his terrible eloquence indications
that that vast ocean had never been stirred
to the bottom, that occasion had never called forth
all its latent powers of destruction. He measures
himself with his antagonist, and is secure of victory.
He presents a front bristling with the deadliest points
of logic, like the spears of the Macedonian phalanx,
and wherever he moves he is invincible. Nevertheless
he appears to advance nothing for the sake
of effect, to be in search of none of the beauties
of style, but rather to avoid them. He is neither
draped, nor painted, nor adorned; but a naked colossus
whose sublimity springs from the perfection
and greatness of its proportions.
Other orators persuade, Demosthenes enforces conviction.
They who listen to him have no choice,—they
must believe. Without offending the reader’s
pride, he makes him ashamed to hesitate. He
reminds one of the Nile at the cataracts, where,
confined by rocks within too narrow limits, it pours
347resistlestly along, swelling, deep, with scattered whirlpools
and foam scarcely visible on its vast surface,
seemingly calm at a short distance, but, to those
who look near, agitated, angry, full of unstemmableunstemmable
currents and boiling motion. He had profoundly
studied human nature, chiefly, of course, as it developes
itself in free states, and, better than any man,
knew by what motives it may, in spite of corruption
and degeneracy, be impelled to strenuous action,
though but for a brief space. His language, flashing
through the moral gloom around him, called
forth bright reflections from whatever was brilliant
or polished, and kindled the fragments of patriotic
emotions into a flame. If genius could regenerate,
could pour the blood of youth into the veins of
age, could substitute loftiness of sentiment, heroic
daring, disinterested love of country, religious faith,
spirituality, for sensual self-indulgence, for sordid
avarice, for a base distrust in Providence, Demosthenes
had renewed the youth of Athens. The
spirit of the old democratic constitution breathes
through all his periods. He stands upon the last
defence of the republican world, when all else had
been carried, the representative of a noble but perished
race, fighting gallantly, though in vain, to preserve
that fragment sacred from the foot of the
spoiler. The passion and the power of democracy
seem concentrated in him. He unites in his character
all the richest gifts of nature under the
guidance of the most consummate art, and, doubtless,
Hume was right when he said that, of all
human productions, his works approach the nearest
to perfection.
Beyond this point it is irksome to proceed in our
view of Grecian literature, which, after the battle of
Cheronæa, was overshadowed by despotism and dwindled
gradually into insignificance. Not that genius
wholly and suddenly disappeared. The soil of Hellenic
intellect was not entirely exhausted, but the
fruit it bore was comparatively insipid. A courtly
348stamp was set upon every thing. Men no longer
obeyed their genuine impulses. It was dangerous
generally, and always profitless to be frank and manly.
Instead of addressing themselves to the healthy
natural sympathies of the people, writers servilely
laboured by conceit and flattery to wring reluctant
patronage from princes. The spirit of affectation,
accordingly, for the first time made its appearance.
Men tortured their ingenuity to invent smart things.
Enthusiasm and passion and earnestness, characteristics
all of popular writers, are never fashionable
among courtiers, who consider sincerity vulgar, and
hypocrisy a virtue. In the later Greek writers,
therefore, who all wrote for some court or other,
we discover the usual frigidity and extravagance
which invariably deform the literature of such states.
Along with these faults, others also are found far
more pernicious: the inculcation of selfishness, gross
sensuality, base maxims, a depraved taste. Man in
the savage state is a garden in which noxious weeds
and the most beautiful flowers and useful plants grow
together; civilised and free, he is the same garden
cleared, as far as possible, of its weeds; but, when
verging a second time into barbarism, the weeds
again become luxuriant, and entirely choke or conceal
the flowers. And thus too it is in literature.
In the literatures of Greece, Rome, and modern
Italy we can now contemplate the complete process;
in our own, a part only, how great a part—it
is not here my business to inquire.
349
Whether the Greeks received their earliest system
of philosophy from the East, as is commonly believed,
or themselves invented it, as to me seems most probable,
there can I think be little doubt that once
engaged in philosophical speculations they exhibited
in the pursuit a degree of boldness and originality,
a patience of research, a power of combination rarely
if ever equalled in succeeding times. For some ages,
it is true, from the days of Thales down to those of
Socrates (B. C. 600 to B. C. 450) physical investigations
and researches chiefly occupied the philosophers
of Greece. They conceived it to be within
the power of man to discover the nature of the
principal elements which compose the world, and
the law’s that regulated its formation.[993] The origin
350likewise of the human race, of which nothing is yet
known but that which has been revealed, naturally
awakened their curiosity and led to many theories
wild and fantastic in the extreme.
Into any consideration of these it is not my design
to enter; but the Greeks had another philosophy,
which, resting on the basis of theology, comprehended
religion, morals, and politics, and may be
regarded as the instrument, the soul, and the measure
of their civilisation. It seems to be a truth
frequently overlooked, that man is civilised exactly
in proportion as he is religious; at least this was
the case in Greece, where the highest developement
of the national mind concurred in Socrates and
Plato with the utmost developement of the religious
instinct, and began immediately to decline in
Aristotle and his successors, arriving at the lowest
degradation among the grovelling sophists of the
lower empire. This division of philosophy occupied
among the Greeks the place, which in modern
times is assigned to religion,[994] that is, it was their
guide through this life, and their preparation for a
better. It may, indeed, be regarded as the spiritual
part of paganism, teaching man his duties, and explaining
the grounds and motives which should lead
to their performance.
There is one article of faith without which no
religion can of course exist—the belief in God. Devoid
of this, it may be doubted whether an individual
or a nation ought not rather to be classed
351among the inferior animals than among men. It
is superfluous, therefore, to say that the Greeks, preëminently
endowed with the highest attributes of
humanity, were a religious people, and held firmly
all the doctrines which entitle a people to such an
appellation. From their ancestors, the Pelasgi,[995] they
inherited a pure and lofty theism, which seems to
have always continued to be the religion of the
more enlightened; while among the mass of the
people, this central truth of religion was gradually
surrounded by a constantly expanding atmosphere of
fable, which obscured its brightness, and in a great
measure concealed its form. Mr. Mitford, whose
acute and philosophical mind clearly discerned this
verity, also seems to have understood the cause.
“A firm belief both in the existence of the Deity, and
in the duty of communication with him, appears
to have prevailed universally in the early ages.
But religion was then the common care of all
men, a sacerdotal order was unknown.”[996]
The institution of an order of priests, however effected,
almost necessarily corrupted the simple truths
of religion, but it is unphilosophical in the highest
degree to consider those ancient priests as impostors
on this account, or to speak of their propagation
of error as craft. Meditating, in seclusion and solitude,
on the few truths which had come down to
them by tradition or been discovered by reason, they
soon bewildered their own wits, and wandered into
superstition.[997] As was too natural, they conceived
that the Divinity must be desirous of giving them
signs, marking what was to be done and what avoided.
The mistake of concomitance for causation,
often made in more learned and refined ages, would
352confirm them in this view. They would, for example,
find that in the order of time the flight of
certain birds over their heads, the appearance of a
serpent in their path, the apparition of certain objects
in a dream, was followed by certain misfortunes;
while other apparitions were succeeded by
contrary events. Out of these observations the
science of augury, divination, &c. arose. Yet the
inventors were not therefore impostors, but rather,
in their intentions, benefactors of mankind; and to
be respected accordingly.
The generation of polytheism is to be in like manner
explained. It was an abuse of the inductive
method of philosophy. Men perceived, as soon as
they began to observe nature and draw inferences
from what they beheld, that the sun and moon[998]
exert extraordinary influence, beneficial or hurtful,
upon mankind and the world they inhabit; and the
supposition was neither unnatural nor absurd that
those glorious bodies, by whose rising and setting,
by whose approximation or retreat, they were in
turn affected with gladness or melancholy, with comfort
or discomfort, with good or evil, must be themselves
possessed of intelligence as well as power, or
at least be inhabited and directed by beings on
whom they bestowed the name of gods. The air,
too, “which bloweth where it listeth while thou canst
not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth,”
sweeping around them invisibly, and appearing only
in its effects, soon obtained the rank of a deity,[999] as
353did the ocean which appears to be alive in all its
extent, and the earth on whose inexhaustible bounty
we subsist.
Out of these elements the sacerdotal families of
Greece framed its religion, which, however, is by
no means to be considered a system of materialism.
They conceived every portion of nature to be animated
by its particular soul, just as they believed
the whole, as a whole, to have one universal soul, the
source of all the others. Their mythology was based
on unity. At every step backwards we find the
number of gods diminish, till at length we arrive at
the Great One, surrounded by the unfathomable
splendours of eternity. This is the θεὸς ὁ θεῶν Ζεὺς,
of whom Plato[1000] and Aristotle constantly speak when
they employ the expression τὸ δαιμόνιον.[1001] Philosophy,
indeed, considered it to be its chiefest task to deliver
men from their multitudinous errors respecting
the nature of God, and of our duties towards
Him; so that, in their speculative notions, very little
difference from our own can be detected. Above
all men, Plato sought to elevate the sphere of philosophy.
In his works, in truth, it moves frequently
within the confines of theology, and seldom quits
them except for the purpose of infusing spirituality
into politics and morals.
This great man, whose profound veneration for the
Deity equalled, perhaps, that of Newton himself,
conceived that human happiness consists wholly in
the knowledge of God, concerning whose character
and attributes he was anxious that no unworthy
ideas should be entertained. His doctrine was, “that
we should ever describe God such as he is.” But,
as Muretus has well observed, this was requiring
too much of human nature, for, most assuredly, we
should never speak of God if we waited to discover
language befitting His majesty. “For the mind of
man is incapable of comprehending the essence
354of God; the nature of God is known to God
alone; he alone perfectly understands himself, and
in himself all things. The mind of man waxes
dim, beholding that stupendous light whose brightness
excels all other lights; and, in proportion as
it endeavours more daringly to soar, is it conscious
of falling below its great aim.”[1002] The Egyptians
expressed the same conviction in the celebrated epigraph
on the base of the veiled statue of Neith at
Saïs: “I am whatever has been, is, or shall be,
and no mortal has drawn aside my veil.” To the
same purpose was the saying of Simonides to Hiero,
“that the more he contemplated the Divine Nature
the less he appeared to comprehend it.” And
Socrates, in the Philebos of Plato, observes that he
shuddered as often as the Great Name was to be
pronounced lest he should bestow upon it some
unworthy epithet.
It would appear, indeed, that the idea which the
theologians of Greece had formed of the Almighty
was very nearly the same as our own; though, in
compliance with popular prejudices, they often made
use of the plural for the singular. Goodness, power,
and knowledge were his characteristics, which in substance
are the same as the types of the theologians
of modern times—goodness, immutability, truth,—goodness
leading the van in both cases, and the remaining
conditions answering perfectly to each other.
For in supreme power and supreme wisdom must
be immutability and truth, since the Almighty can
do all he wills and must ever will what is right.[1003]
In accordance with these views, the spiritual philosophy
of Greece maintained that the Deity is the
source of no evil, though traces of a far different
theory are here and there discoverable among the
poets. Thus, speaking of the calamities arising from
the anger of Achilles, Homer says
355And, again—
Ζεὺς δ᾽ ἀρετὴν ἄνδρασιν ὀφέλλει τε, μινύθει τε
So, again, the two vases in the palace of Zeus,
out of which he distributed good and evil to mankind.[1005]
Hesiod also introduces Zeus, boasting that instead of
fire he will give men a curse:—
Τοῖς δ᾽ ἐγὼ ἀντὶ πυρὸς δώσω κακόν
But in all ages men lay their misfortunes at the
door of Providence. However, though the notions
men entertain of God be ever so just, their conduct
will not be thereby influenced, or a religion, properly
speaking, created, unless several other truths be equally
believed. It must be established not only that the
maker of the universe still regards his workmanship,
and will punish all those who seek to disorder the
machine, by entailing remorse upon transgression, but
that man is not a fugitive being, who can escape out
of the hands of God by shrinking into annihilation,
but a creature who, in accordance with his will, must
run the vast circle of eternity, co-lasting with God
himself.[1006] This is the great keystone of religion: without
this, men will believe that even the Almighty can
have no hold upon them; that they die, and their
accountability ceases. The doctrine of immortality,
however, has everywhere opened the skies to man,
and set him upon the discovery of the steps leading
thither, and, at the same time, has checked his daring,
and poisoned his guilty pleasures.
From the remotest ages the immortality of the soul
constituted a leading dogma in the religion of Greece,
and was necessarily accompanied by the persuasion,
that to the good that immortality would bring happiness,
and to the evil the contrary.[1007] Homer is full of this,
and the fables, wherein the enemies of God, parricides,
356murderers, the perpetrators of impiety and wrong, are,
after death, banished to the depths of Tartarus, while
various degrees of glory and happiness, not altogether
unlike what is sublimely shadowed forth by St. Paul,
are attributed to the good. That part, for example,
of Heracles, which is divine, ascends to Heaven: Achilles
enjoys the everlasting serenity of the Islands of the
Blessed; and, generally, every virtuous man who rightly
performed his duty ascended to the mansion prepared
for him in the stars, there to live for ever in
happiness.[1008] They taught, moreover, that the spirit of
man is of heavenly birth: without this we had lived
as so many animals. But God bestowed upon us an
immortal soul, to watch as a guardian angel over the
body, and placed it in the loftiest part of our frame,
to teach us to look upward, and remember our birth,—that
men are not creatures of clay but children of
God and heirs of immortality.[1009]
It will not, however, surprise those who comprehend
the constitution of human nature, to find that
the Greeks, deprived as they were of revelation, were
not content with the simple dogma of immortality,
rendered happy or otherwise by rewards and punishments,
but imagined a return of the soul to earth, and
its passage through a long succession of bodies, until
the stains,[1010] contracted during its first sojourn, had been
obliterated: properly, therefore, their Hell was a kind
of Purgatory, and, no doubt, suggested the original
idea of that intermediate place to the Church of
Rome. The religious part of the pagan world, those
especially who went through the ceremonies of expiation
and initiatory rites, firmly believed that bad men
357met in the realms of Hades with a just retribution for
their crimes, and were again launched into the career
of life, that they might receive from others that which
they had done unto them.[1011] Though even in those
days there were not wanting persons who affected to
possess the power of absolution, nay, of granting for
a moderate sum of money indulgences and licences to
sin. These ragged impostors, of course, patronised
only rich sinners, over whose heads vengeance might
be hanging for crimes committed either by themselves
or their ancestors, (since the Greeks also believed that
the sins of the parents are visited upon the children
to the third and fourth generations,[1012]) professing to be
masters of arts and incantations by which the gods
were compelled to grant their prayers.
But while the vulgar and the superstitious were
thus deluded, they who possessed superior education
and superior minds, united, with a belief in the future,
a more cheerful faith in the justice and beneficence of
the Deity. They discovered, even by the light of reason,
that human nature has been perverted from its
original perfection,—that an evil principle has been
introduced into our inmost essence,—that in our sinful
state we are at enmity with God and all goodness,—and
must by prayers and sacrifices be purified and
reconciled to him ere we can taste of happiness. On
the subject of prayer the wiser Greeks entertained notions
not wholly unbecoming a Christian.[1013] They well
enough understood, that it is not to be considered as
an importuning of God for wealth or fame or wisdom,
or, as ignorant persons suppose, an impious desire that
358He would for our sakes depart from his eternal purposes;
but merely the nourishing in our minds of a
profound veneration for the Almighty, a trust in his
Providence and wisdom, an habitual disclosure voluntarily
made of our inmost thoughts and desires, which
must be known to him whether we will or not.
Hence the great philosopher of antiquity[1014] simply
prayed for those things which it might please God
to send, and that if he asked for anything wrong it
might be denied him.
It is no doubt true, as Mr. Mitford[1015] has observed,
that the Gods in Homer are sometimes introduced
favouring the perpetrators of injustice. But this is in
contradiction to the general tone of the Greek religion;
according to the tenets of which, every injured
person had his Erinnyes who avenged whatever
wrongs or violence he might suffer. Nay, even animals
were comprised within the protecting circle of
this beneficent superstition; and the God Pan was
intrusted with the punishment of excesses perpetrated
against them,[1016]
“When vultures that, with grief exceeding measure,
Lament their heart’s lost treasure,
And o’er their empty nest, in torturing woe,
Pass to and fro,
Borne on their oarlike wings,
Missing the task that brings
Joy with it, send their piercing wail on high,
Apollo, Pan, or Zeus hearing the cry,
Charges th’ Erinnyes, though late,
The penalty decreed by Fate
To visit on the spoilers far or nigh.”
Another doctrine, which we might scarcely expect
to discover in paganism, constituted, nevertheless, a
part of the Greek religion,—I mean the power of penitence.
359In all cases, indeed, this would not avail. The
laws of nature (πεπρωμένη, fate) would have their course
whatever might be the conduct or disposition of man;
but in all other cases, tears[1017] shed in secret, solemn acts
of religion, and deep contrition were supposed to appease
the anger of Heaven. Besides, when afflictions
fell upon men, they were not necessarily regarded as
evils; for by suffering, the soul, they thought, is purified,
chastened, endued with wisdom,—
“Sweet are the uses of adversity;”
and, hence, of those trials which ignorance regards as
evils, most, if not all, are but so many dispensations of
mercy, designed to work off the dross of sin, and restore
the spirit to its original brightness.[1018] By these
means, likewise, transgressorstransgressors were believed to make
some atonement for their crimes. Remembrance
haunted them even in sleep. Their miseries rose up
before them, compassed them round, and urged them
by invisible stripes into her track, “whose ways are
ways of pleasantness, and all whose paths are peace.”
But over the impenitent wicked vengeance for ever
impended; nor could wealth or rank purchase impunity,
as the bare-footed friars and ass-mounters of the
time were fain to persuade the credulous and weak-minded.
Long withheld, the anger of the Gods descended
at length in showers, utterly extirpating the
evil-doers.[1019] Thus perished Paris, the violator of
marriage and of hospitable rites; thus Clytemnæstra
and Ægisthos, adulterers and murderers; thus the
whole house of Œdipos, involved in an unutterable
cycle of misery and crime. The interval, moreover,
between the commission of guilt and its final punishment,
was given up to the Erinnyes,[1020] those dire and
360mysterious powers of vengeance, whose breathless
chace after crime is pourtrayed with so much sublimity
by Sophocles. These divinities, starting into instant
birth, whenever blood was unlawfully shed,
walked perpetually beside the murderer to his grave,—to
him alone visible, to him alone audible.
The gross and carnal-minded contrived, indeed,
in the case of lesser transgressionstransgressions, to remain blind
to this deformity, while youth and health and prosperity
cast their illusions over their path. But age
in this matter sharpened their sight. On drawing
near the brink of the grave, the vices, hitherto so
blythe and comely, appeared to grow more shrivelled
and hideous and unlovely than their own impure
countenances, and they would then fain have parted
company with them. But, no! Having been comrades
of their own choosing, Zeus chained them to
their side to the last, unless repentance severed the
link; and their fearful howlings, night and day, broke
their repose, harrowed up their feelings, augmented
tenfold their terrors, while sweat and tears, and agonising
shrieks burst from them even in their dreams.
The wicked, therefore, in the deepest darkness of
paganism, were not left wholly to the error of their
ways. But God reserved himself a witness in their
hearts, and set up a light by which they might
rightly, if they chose, direct their footsteps. It is
true that the cardinal verities of religion were then
but very imperfectly perceived, that, to get at them
at all, men had to break through the shells of many
fables, and that, when found, they must be for the most
part enjoyed in secret, far from the din of ambition.
Not, indeed, that the people refused their sympathy
to virtue,—public opinion is never so far corrupted,—but
that in the world there has always existed a
strong current bearing men far from the track of
duty and holiness.
There was, no doubt, some degree of fanaticism
mixed up with all this. The priesthood, an order of
men much calumniated, but without whom society
361would be worse by far than it is, found it necessary
to allure men into the bosom of their church by
imposing ceremonies, by sacrifices, and by the mysterious
disclosure of certain truths in the performance
of certain rites. It will be seen that I allude to the
mysteries. On the occasion of initiation, as if to
intimate that men cannot be virtuous or religious
by proxy, each individual became his own priest and
sacrificed[1021] for himself. But in what initiation itself
consisted, no man knows. Antiquity has revealed
nothing, and nothing can we discover. The
hypotheses of scholars are, therefore, so many dreams,
and a mere waste of ingenuity; for, if they should by
chance hit the mark, there exist no means of proving
that they have done so. But of this we are sure,
that a persuasion was widely spread that a blissful
immortality awaited the initiated. A greater degree
of holiness was supposed to attach to them,—there
was a spell shed around their persons,—in situations
of danger they experienced less of the fear of death.
In storms, for example, at sea, when the ship seemed
about to sink—"Have you been initiated?" was
the question men asked each other. Still, among
philosophers, the wisest and best sometimes neglected
this popular consummation of a pious life.
Socrates belonged not to this communion, a circumstance
which rendered it more easy to fasten upon him
the charge of impiety, in those days more atrocious
than now, since, to be esteemed inimical to the gods,
was the surest way to make enemies of men. Further
than this, it is not necessary that I enter into
the gentile faith, which only incidentallyincidentally, as it affected
morals, belongs to my subject.
But there exists in all countries a minor cycle of
superstitions, which, more strongly perhaps than anything
paints the peculiarities of the national character.
In the north, as we know, this indigenous belief has
survived all changes in the public creed, and will subsist
362to the last, lingering among our woods, our ruins,
our moonlit meadows, our churchyards, by our firesides.
Fairies, witches, ghosts, goblins can by no advances
in civilisation be put to flight. They sail in our
steamers on the ocean, ride at quickest speed along
the railroads, go to bed with the first lady in the
land, and even nestle beneath the statesman’s vest.[1022]
With us these aërial beings, or spectres of crime,
too commonly assume an aspect grotesque or devilish,
but they nevertheless keep alive in the popular
mind the spirit of romance and poetry, one of the
never-failing handmaids of religion. Mythology
rarely penetrates down to these primitive superstitions,
which, however, constitute the basis of the
whole science, and in Greece assumed, in many
cases, forms of beauty analogous to its loftier and
more poetic fables.
The place occupied in our own popular mythology
by the “light-sandalled fays,” was in Greece filled
by the Hamadryads and Nymphs.[1023] No wood or
grove or solitary tree, no fountain or rill in moss-grown
cell or rustic cavern, existed without its co-existent
divinity, female generally, and instinct with
beauty and beneficence. These creatures, the Jinn
and Jinneh of the Arabs, extended their dominion
over all minor streams, and sported, in the softness
and stillness of night, athwart the billows silvered
by the moon; but the deities of great rivers, as the
Acheloös, the Peneios, and others, were male. Being
only a few degrees raised above humanity, they were
often enamoured of mortals, to whom they appeared
arrayed in loveliness, amid the glimmering forests,
363at dawn or twilight, or when
“overhead the moon
Wheels her pale course.”
It was not always, however, that the love of a
nymph proved a blessing. There were occasions
when, having for a moment revealed their superhuman
charms to some shepherd in his romantic
solitude, or to some poet worshiping the muses alone,
beside the inspiring mount or spring, they again capriciously
withdrew, and left him vision-smitten to
pine or, perchance, to die.
Nor were the Greeks wholly devoid of belief in
evil spirits, for the demon Alastor,[1024] which was a
deification of the principle that incites to crime and
afterwards brings vengeance, can in no way be regarded
as good. Typhon, too, with the Giants and
Titans, had at least a predominance of evil in their
character, but these are treated of at length by the
mythologists. Several superstitions, commonly supposed
to be wholly Oriental, were current in Greece,
such as that men had the power by using certain
spells to quit their mortal forms and roam disembodied
through the earth. By magic rings, too,
and helmets they might be rendered invisible, and,
thus protected, enter into the secret chambers of
kings, pollute their wives, and rifle their treasures.[1025]
Means, moreover, they had, confounded in those ages
with supernatural power, of charming poisonous serpents,
as to this day is done by the subjects of our
Eastern empire, and the snake-catchers of Egypt;
and though it be now known that opium constitutes
no small portion of this charm, the people
364generally, both in the East and West, conceive other
influences to be employed than those of legitimate
art.
There was not in later times, perhaps, that boundless
faith in spells and transformations still subsisting
in the East. But in the earlier ages, and in the
gloomy mountain recesses of Arcadia, events equally
strange were supposed to have happened. Thus Lycaon
having sacrificed an infant to Zeus Lycæos,
and sprinkled the blood upon the altar, immediately
became a wolf;[1026] and it was reported that any one
who performed this dreadful sacrifice, and afterwards
by accident tasted of the human entrails, when mingled
with those of other victims, forthwith underwent
the same transformation.[1027] Thus we find the
gloomy legend of the Breton forests existing in the
heart of the Peloponnesos, where there can, I fear,
be little doubt, that human victims were habitually
offered up. Another ancient superstition, which found
its way into Italy, was, that a person first seen by
a wolf lost his voice, whereas if the man obtained
the prior glimpse of the animal no evil ensued.[1028]
The belief in ghosts, coeval no doubt with man,
flourished especially among the Greeks. Hesiod
entertained peculiar notions on this subject, which
some suppose to have been borrowed from the East,
that is, he believed that the good men of former
times became, at their decease, guardian spirits, and
were entrusted[1029] with the care of future races. Plato
adopts these ghosts, and gives them admission into
his Republic, where they perform an important part
and receive peculiar honours.[1030] When they appeared,
365as sometimes they would, by day, their visages were
pale and their forms unsubstantial like the creations
of a dream.[1031] But, as among us, they chiefly affected
the night for their gambols, and in Arcadia particularly,
would appear to honest people returning home late
in cross-roads, and such places whence they were not
to be dislodged but by being pelted apparently by
pellets made from bread crumb, on which men had
wiped their fingers, carefully preserved for this purpose
by the good folks about Phigaleia.[1032]
The most remarkable prank played by any ancient
ghosts, however, with whose history I am acquainted,
did not take place in Greece, but in the Campagna di
Roma, where, after a bloody battle between the Romans
and the Huns, in which all but the generals
and their staff bit the dust, two spectral armies, the
ghosts of the fallen warriors, appeared upon the field
to enact the contest over again. During three whole
days did these valiant souls of heroes, as the Homeric
phrase is, carry on the struggle; and the historian who
relates the fact, is careful to observe that they did not
fall short of living soldiers, either in fire or courage.
People saw them distinctly charge each other, and
heard the clash of their arms. Similar exhibitions
were to be seen in different parts of the ancient world.
In the great plain of Sogda,[1033] for example, spectral
armies of mighty courage but voiceless, were in the
constant habit of engaging in mortal combat at the
break of day. Caria likewise possessed a favourite
366haunt of these warlike phantoms. But here the
apparition was only occasional, and all its evolutions
were performed in the air, which was the case in
England, as we have been assured by very old people,
before the breaking-out of the American war. Another
fray of ghosts took place every summer in Sicily
on the plain of the Four Towers, but in this case the
whole business was carried on at noon, to the no small
annoyance of Pan who usually takes his siesta at that
hour,—that is, if they were as noisy in their battles
as the Campanian spectres.[1034]
Like the Roman Catholics, the Greeks had great
faith in miraculous images, holy wells, &c. and their
descendants still maintain the same creed. Near the
Church of Haghia Parthenoë in Crete, is a most
copious fountain deriving its name from the same
holy and miracle-working virgins to whom the church
is dedicated, and who also preside over the waters.
“The worship of the headless body of Molos has
also its parallel in modern times.”[1035] As the Cretan
Christians for many years reverenced the head of Titus,
though deprived of its body, so their heathen ancestors
used annually to honour by a religious festival the
body of Molos, the well-known father of Meriones,
though deprived of its head. The legend, told to
explain the ancient ceremony in which the headless
statue of a man thus exhibited, was that “after Molos
got possession of a nymph’s person without having
first obtained her consent, his body was found, but
his head had disappeared.”[1036] An image of the Virgin
travelled by water from Constantinople to Greece,
where it was shortly after seen standing up in the
waves near Mount Athos. Similar legends obtained
of old. Near Biennos in Crete,[1037] “has been dug up
the bones and skulls of giants, many of whom were
eight or ten times the size of common men.”[1038]
367Of the various modes of penetrating into the future,[1039]
prevalent among the people, I may mention
some few. Prophetesses are frequently spoken of
in Scripture, and in the Acts of the Apostles[1040] is
given an account of a young female slave who
brought her master large sums of money by this
trade, which was that of a gipsy. Others there
were who, like many among the Orientals, professed
to understand the language of birds. A slave, said
to possess this knowledge, is celebrated, by Porphyry,
and was probably from the East.[1041] One sort of
divination was practised by pouring drops of oil into
a vessel and looking on it, when they pretended to
behold a representation of what was to take place.
This in Egypt is still practised, merely substituting
ink for oil, and a great many travellers appear to
believe in it. Soldiers going to war were especially
liable to fall into this kind of foolery.[1042]
The use of holy water on entering temples is of
great antiquity. This custom was called περίῤῥανσις,
and the act was performed with the branch of the
fortunate olive.[1043] There stood at the door of the
temple a capacious lustral font, whose contents had
been rendered holy by extinguishing[1044] therein a
lighted brand from the altar; thence water was
sprinkled on themselves, by worshipers or by the
officiating priest. A similar apparatus stood at the
entrance to the Agora, to purify the orators, &c.
going to the public assembly. It was likewise placed
at the door of private houses, wherein there was a
corpse, that every one might purify himself on going
out.[1045] Superstitious persons usually walked about
368with a laurel leaf in their mouth, or occasionally
bearing a staff of laurel, there being a preserving
power in that sacred shrub: hence arose the proverb
δαφνίκην φορῶ βακτήριαν,—"I carry a laurel staff,"
when a man would say, I have no fear. Persons
not thus protected it is to be presumed were terrified
if a weasel or dog crossed their path; and the
omen could only be averted by casting three stones
at it, the number three being exceedingly agreeable
to the gods. Certain fruits would not burst on the
tree if three stones were cast into the same hole with
the seed when the tree was planted. Two brothers
walking on the way conceived it ominous of evil if
they happened to be parted by a stone. On every
trifling occasion altars and chapels were erected to
the gods, particularly by women; no house or street
was free from them. For example, if a snake crept
into the house through the eaves, forthwith an altar
was erected. At places where three roads met, stones
were set up, to be worshiped by travellers, who
anointed them with oil. If a mouse nibbled a hole
in a corn-sack, they would fly to the portent interpreter,
and inquire what they should do,—"Get it
mended," was sometimes the honest reply. Horrid
dreams[1046] might be expiated, and their evil effects be
averted, by telling them to the rising sun. When
the candles spit, it was a sign of rain.[1047] During
thunder and lightning they made the noise called
Poppysma,[1048] which it was hoped might avert the
danger. On board ship sailors entertained the idea,
that to carry a corpse would be the cause of shipwreck,
as happened to the vessel which was bearing
to Eubœa the bones of Pelops.[1049] The sailors of
the Mediterranean, for this reason, will refuse to
receive mummies on board.
