I
PRIVATE LIFE
THE just balance which Greece in its greatest days had succeeded in establishing between public power and the rights of the individual could not be maintained indefinitely. After having helped the city to triumph over the patriarchal family, individualism for some time suffered itself to be kept within bounds, on the one hand by the still solid organization of the small family, and still more on the other hand by the apparently immutable law of the State. But the right of the individual was to degenerate into egoism. By steady encroachments, by increasingly exacting demands, it was to undermine the family and ruin the city.
At the close of the fourth century the great towns experienced what has been justly called the “marriage crisis,” and the “reign of the courtesans.”1 This does not mean that in an epoch when men were looking for happiness in private life they were not alive to the charm of well-matched marriages. The works of Aristotle—who himself rejoiced in having married the niece of his friend Hermias—are full of passages in which marriage appears, not as a simple business proposition nor yet as an alliance having for end the propagation of the race, but as a communion of souls designed to satisfy all the moral needs of existence, to bestow on husband and wife the advantages and blessedness of mutual love.2 What was new and indicated a serious change in custom was the fact that marriage was no longer considered as a strict duty of the individual, bound in his turn to hand on the life he had received in trust from his ancestors; it came often to be regarded as an artificial institution, a mere convention. In the opinion of devisers of Utopian societies it could be replaced by community of women; in the eyes of the common people it was simply one of the alternatives offered to each man in his search for personal well-being and pleasure. A suitor could say in open court: “We have wives that our name may be perpetuated, concubines that our needs may be cared for, courtesans that we may be diverted.”3
Undoubtedly concubines and hetairai were always prominent in Greece; husbands there never prided themselves upon conjugal fidelity. The laws of Draco mentioned without any reprobation certain concubines,4 and the liaison of Pericles with Aspasia was publicly known. But the concubinage to which ancient legislation accorded a sort of legitimacy had at least for object the procreation of natural children in case of a sterile marriage, and it is well known that the great statesman, in spite of his prestige, failed to secure recognition for his beautiful and learned Milesian in Athenian society. Now everything was allowed without the necessity of pleading excuses and without causing scandal. Illicit unions no longer shocked men. The hardy bachelor and the courtesan became the normal and often pleasing characters of the comedy. In a comparison between free love and the state of marriage one of the characters of the poet Amphis does not hide his preferences: “Is not a concubine more desirable than a wife ?... The one has on her side the law which compels you to retain her, no matter how displeasing she may be; the other knows that she must hold a man by behaving well or else look for another.”5 This was no pure tirade, effective on the stage; it was a current maxim. Men of letters and artists conformed to it for the most part : Praxiteles openly took for mistress his model, Phryne; Menander lived with Glycera, Diphilus with Gnathæna. Thus the demi-monde shone in highest circles; it set the tone. It was not only hot-blooded youth which invited concubines to its symposia. Socrates, the passionate admirer of beauty, sentimentalized over Theodote.6 Phryne created no more scandal when she dedicated her statue in gold at Delphi or when she placed her image by the side of Aphrodite in the temple of Eros at Thespiæ, than did her lover and defender Hyperides when he brought her forth naked in full court.7
A Plato nevertheless could find much to condemn in these customs : he who was not married would gladly have forbidden all intercourse with a woman other than a legitimate wife; but one has to live with one’s times, to resign oneself to necessary concessions, and the statesman tolerated the unions which displeased the moralist, on condition that they were concealed.8 As to the philosophers who propagated the doctrine of pleasure they did not trouble about appearances, and rendered this kind of homage to virtue neither by their precepts nor by their example; they were openly opposed to marriage : Aristippus preferred to be the lover of Lais, as Epicurus later was that of Leontion.
When such ideas on marriage prevailed what happened to the birth-rate ? In Greece, where the land was not fertile and where it was naturally divided, the rule of equal inheritance was no sooner established than it inspired in fathers of families fears for the future of their children and inclined them towards Malthusianism. The poet Hesiod, a small proprietor of Bœotia, even in his day wished to have only one son (μουνογβνής).9 Moreover some of the old laws urged the upper classes to limit the number of their children, one of the Cretan by prescribing the seclusion of women and homosexual relations, those of Lycurgus at Sparta and of Philolaus at Thebes by constituting a fixed number of inalienable and indivisible entailed estates.10 At the close of the fourth century men evaded as much as possible the duties of fatherhood. “There is no one so unhappy as a father, unless it is a father who has more than one child”; “there is no need to have children” :11 such were henceforth the maxims of current wisdom. Daughters were not wanted at all; more than one son was too many. One son—that was the ideal if one wanted to leave posterity. As justification they had recourse to the sophism of paternal solicitude: the man of moderate means declined to produce a line of paupers, the rich man thought it his duty to prevent the division of his patrimony after his death; they did not wish for many children, they said, because they loved children too dearly. In reality the parents were most often obeying the promptings of egoism: they were repelled by the daily trials and troubles which a numerous family causes, by the expense which children entail until their education is finished.12
All methods were good which restricted birth or offered a way of ridding oneself of the newly born. Abortion was punishable only if it were practised by a woman against the wish of her husband or by a third person who had seduced her; provided that the head of the family had ordered it justice did not interfere.13 If efforts to prevent a child from coming into the world failed, a way remained which also was not considered criminal: it might be killed or exposed.14 Exposure was a very frequent practice: the child abandoned by its parents and rescued by some kind-hearted soul became a popular character in the new comedy. One might think that the practices devised by individuals and tolerated by the State would at least call forth the protests of philosophers. But this by no means happened : by reason of their theories, because they wished to preserve the city from a fatal overpopulation, they countenanced all restrictions upon birth (επισχέσεις γενέσεως)15 Plato, in order to maintain the purity of the race and to prevent licentiousness from carrying the number of citizens beyond 5,040, proposed that all weakly children or those born of base or elderly parents should be killed. Aristotle, in order to prevent the growth of an indigent class, could think of no better scheme than that public authorities should issue an edict recommending abortions and exposures.16 One can see in what direction the State would have acted if it had attempted to interfere. Malthusianism had free play.
In certain parts of Greece egoism made such ravages that a complete disorganization of the family resulted. Very characteristic in this respect is the spectacle afforded by Bceotia towards the end of the third century, according to the description which Polybius gives:
“People who had no children, in place of leaving their property to their collaterals, as was formerly the custom, spent it on banquets and drinking parties and bestowed it on their friends as common property ; a good number of those who had children reserved the major part of their wealth for such convivial parties; so much so that many Boeotians held more supper parties in the month than the month had days.”17
The same Polybius examines the question in a more general fashion; he shows us the gravity of an evil which reached its climax in his time, but which had raged for two centuries. A propos of this he makes some very illuminating remarks :
“We see in our time throughout the whole of Greece such a shrinking of the birth-rate and, in a word, such depopulation, that the towns are deserted and the fields lie waste, although there are neither continual wars nor epidemics. . . . The cause of the evil is manifest. . . . From vanity, from avarice or from cowardice men are unwilling either to marry or to bring up children without marrying; at the most they will have only one or two in order that they may leave them a fortune and ensure for them a luxurious existence : thus the plague has rapidly assumed dangerous proportions. If once war or sickness comes to claim its tribute in these families of one or two children, the line inevitably dies out and, just as with swarms of bees, the cities, becoming depopulated, quickly lose their power.”18
Whilst the philosophers still clung to the belief that there was a danger of an excessive birth-rate, actually the excess of deaths over births was proving the efficacy of Malthusian practices. Population diminished alike in democratic and in aristocratic cities. Athens, which numbered 30,000 citizens at the time of the Persian wars, had more than 40,000 in the time of her greatest prosperity.19 Although the Peloponnesian war caused her to lose again what she had gained,20 voluntary restrictions cost her as much in the fourth century as pestilence and war combined in the preceding century : the census ordered by Demetrius of Phalerum placed the number of citizens at 21,000;.21 At Sparta the situation was even worse. By making the patrimonial kleros an indivisible entail and by forbidding citizens to engage in a trade, the law compelled the family to restrict birth as rigidly as possible. The best thing was to have only one son; if by some misfortune one had more then the younger ones settled down in common on property other than the kleros and took only one wife between them.22 This involved alarming depopulation.23 The State attempted to counteract this by imposing a moral slur on the bachelor and by according certain advantages to the fathers of three or four children.24 But what result could it hope to obtain by such superficial palliatives ? It neutralized the effects itself by the restrictions which it placed upon entry into the upper class. Moreover, it even required that the newlyborn, whom the father wished to rear, should be brought before a council of inspection, before their right of succeeding to the kleros was recognized, and, if they were considered unfit for their duties, they were sent to the Apothetai, to death.25 The dearth of men (ολιγανθρωττία) was at Sparta, therefore, an evil which could only be remedied by a change, not merely in manners, but in the constitution itself. That was not to be thought of. Thus the Spartans qualified to bear arms saw their ranks grow sparser with a disastrous rapidity. In 480, they numbered more than 8,000 ; in 371, they numbered only 2,000; forty years or so later Aristotle computed the number of “Equals” as 700. Doubtless the decline in the numbers of the supreme class did not represent pure loss to population, for an appreciable number of “Equals” were relegated, because of inadequate incomes, to the class of “Inferiors”; but, on the whole, the diminution was constant and remained considerable.
The countryside in particular suffered from depopulation, for the town exercised a strong attraction. It had not always been so. Until the time of the Peloponnesian war the landowners of Attica, rich or poor, had for the most part continued the practice of living in the country. In those days a Strepsiades “led a delightful peasant life—all in a muck, careless of dress, free from care, abounding in bees and sheep and grapes”; sniffing eagerly the smell of “new wine, and cheese and wool and fertility”; but he had only to marry a woman of high birth, a niece of Megacles, to be dragged off to the town and to lose all hope of seeing his son “bringing in the goats as he himself had done, leaping over the rocks in his leather jerkin.”26 When Pericles concentrated the population in the town, in order to leave a gap between the enemy and themselves, it was a heartbreaking, bitter thing for the country dwellers to abandon the houses and temples to which all their family traditions bound them: “they were called upon to change their habits of life and to bid farewell to what each regarded as his native city.”27 Now however the city had become a magnet. The prosperous farmers were lured towards it by a desire for comfort, a taste for society or for politics. Ischomachus, the type of great landowner who required a steward to manage his labourers, lived in the town and went every day to his estate in the early morning, by foot or by horse.28 As for the small peasants, resistance became more and more difficult. Either they were evicted by pitiless creditors or in a bad year they would listen to the tempting offers of land dealers and abandon their land. In districts where the sole resource was cultivation or breeding, as for instance in Arcadia and Achæa, there was nothing to do but to emigrate and attach themselves to some band of mercenaries; elsewhere they went into the town and engaged in commerce.29 Thus, at the same time as the population was diminishing, the exodus from the country was changing its distribution.
ARTS AND LETTERS
In societies in which unbridled individualism is destroying the communal spirit arts and letters inevitably reflect the change. From whatever angle one looks one notices in Greece between the fifth and fourth centuries great differences in these two domains.
A crisis which shook the very foundations of Greece necessarily modified the material and moral conditions of art. Men no longer thought in terms of common work for the embellishment of the city: the weakening of patriotism, even more perhaps than the impoverishment of the public treasury, made that impossible. Orders came from individuals whose wealth permitted them to satisfy their desire for beautiful things, their love of luxury or their vanity; they came more often still from Greek or Oriental princes who, in Cyprus, at Halicarnassus, at Sidon, at Pella, at Syracuse, wished to adorn their capital with monuments destined to perpetuate their memory. In this new world the masters, in order to advance themselves, cast away the old traditions like so much useless matter and demanded freedom to develop their own qualities according to their inspiration and the fashion of the moment.
Until the fourth century architecture had been solely concerned with the building of temples which, from one town to another, rivalled each other in splendour. The houses were of a rustic appearance, small, badly built, inconvenient, scattered in haphazard fashion along narrow and tortuous little streets.
“The edifices which their administrations have given us,” said Demosthenes, “their decorations of our temples and the offerings deposited by them, are so numerous and so magnificent, that all the efforts of posterity cannot exceed them. Then, in private life, so exemplary was their moderation, their adherence to the ancient manners so scrupulously exact, that, if any of you ever discovered the house of Aristides, or Miltiades, or any of the illustrious men of those times, he must know that it was not distinguished by the least extraordinary splendour.”
To this patriarchal simplicity of the great days of old the orator opposes “private houses whose magnificence surpasses that of certain public buildings.”30 Doubtless he exaggerates the contrast, advocate as he is. In the fifth century wealthy Athenians lived on their estate, and, though they usually neglected the pied-à-terre which they possessed in the town, the house which they inhabited in the country was sometimes beautiful and well appointed.31 In the town itself at that epoch there were mansions remarkable for their lodge, their painted vestibule, their pillared halls, their bath-rooms, and whose chambers, with their ceilings covered with arabesques, with their sculptured wainscotting, with their walls decorated with paintings, were adorned with gay tapestries, with Milesian beds, with vases of earthenware, of bronze, of precious metals.32 But this luxury was exceptional and reserved for a few great families. Later it spread. Timotheus built for himself a house which testified to his riches and which was called his “tower”; the house of Midias at Eleusis shadowed the whole neighbourhood; Phocion’s house was regarded as quiet and yet it had walls covered with bronze.33 Anyone who had a comfortable income wished to have rooms to offer to his guests, to extend the ground-floor by a garden, to surround the peristyle with higher galleries, to have the walls painted by artists of renown. During this time the monuments of the Acropolis remained unfinished; the people found money only for military works, for fortifications, for an arsenal, or for constructions which ministered to its pleasure or its convenience—a theatre of stone and a colonnaded walk, the portico of Philon. . . . Where were now those happy years in which Pericles, Ictinus, and Pheidias with united efforts strove to raise for the glory of Athena a sanctuary which should be worthy of her ?
Monumental sculpture had now perforce to restrict its sphere, save in remote Caria where an opulent dynast wished it to make the Mausoleum one of the wonders of the world. Statuary took its place and assumed an essentially individual character. In art, as in literature, the predominating form was the portrait: what subject could better please the Maecenases who wished to have good value for their money, or the public which was solely interested in the illustrious men of the present and the past ? In place of the bas- reliefs which depicted religious myths, the exploits of heroes and the ceremonies of national festivals on pediments and friezes, one now saw in public places, in palæstræ and gymnasia, in the parks dedicated to the Muses, in mansions and palaces, the heads and busts of prosperous merchants and concubines, of strategoi and hipparchs, of poets and philosophers, of kosmetai and benefactors, and kings.34 Leochares even consented to engrave in marble the features of Lykiskos, a slave merchant. After the end of the fourth century practically all sculptors, and the most illustrious ones, Scopas, Praxiteles, Lysippus, were “makers of men.”35 Even the gods were transformed into men; their majesty was tempered in scènes de genre which showed Hermes carrying the divine child or Apollo killing lizards; preference was given to those which symbolized joy, intoxication and voluptuousness, to Dionysus and Aphrodite. Sculptors were individualists in the subjects they treated and still more in their manner of treating them. They tried, each in his turn, to express states of mind and to merge their own with that which emanated from their model. Whether pathetic or voluptuous, their works breathe forth a sentimentality and a sensuality which are entirely personal. The history of art had reached a point when, being no longer attached to a collective idea, it dissolved into a history of the artists.
Painting, since it is more fitted to realistic expression, outstripped plastic art. It was besides given scope for executing vast decorative compositions, such as those which were painted by Euphranor in the temple of Zeus the Deliverer at Athens and by Zeuxis in the palace of Archelaus at Pella; but, in general, the fresco was supplanted by the easel-piece which was suitable both for wealthy individuals and for sovereigns. To whatever school they belonged painters gave to mythology the human aspect which it assumed in the theatre, transformed current ideas into allegories, painted the battles of the epoch, sought in common life scenes for genre pictures and, inclining more and more to precise observation, affected above all the portrait. They were also sons of their times in the prices which they demanded for their works : we are told that Zeuxis received from Archelaus 400 minæ (about £1,500), that Aristides paid 10 minæ for each figure in a military scene which grouped a hundred of them (about £4,000) and that Apelles obtained from the Ephesians for a portrait of Alexander 20 talents of gold (about £5,000).36 There was the same development in literary forms.
The drama, born in Athens, spread throughout the whole of Greece which was covered with theatres ; but if it was to continue to produce fine work it was more than ever essential that it should remain faithful to its past. The very organization of the contests and plays revealed a new state of mind. In the fifth century the theatre brought the whole city to worship before the altar of Dionysus. The dithyrambic and dramatic contests were held between tribes or between choragoi chosen by the archon : in the lists of victors and on the votive offerings dedicated in commemoration of the victories the name of the tribe appeared first, before that of the choragos, for the prize for the dithyramb ; the name of the choragos preceded that of the poet for the prizes for comedy and tragedy. In the fourth century, although the organization of the theatre retained its public character, the name of the choragos, the delegate of the State, disappeared, and was replaced by those of the poet and the principal actor; soon also in the dithyrambic contests, the name of the executant, of the auletes, prevailed over that of the author.37 Collective, anonymous effort was almost completely a thing of the past. Individuals who formerly had been kept in the background now attempted to thrust themselves into the limelight : so much so and so successfully that eventually the audience was more interested in the acting than in the merits of the play, and the virtuosity of musicians was ranked higher than the merit of the composers.
Nor did the spectators look to the theatre for the same kind of pleasure as formerly. Tragedy was démodé ; men were content with revivals which exalted as classics the three great poets of the fifth century. But though men had a respectful admiration for Æsehylus and Sophocles who remained faithful to the religious and patriotic conception of the old legends, they raved about Euripides. What a sign of the times ! Here was a poet who, by his loathing for public life, his mobile and restless nature, his passion for reasoning and subtle psychology, his tendency to exalt passion and to make his persons speak in character, stood outside his century: he achieved his first victory at the age of forty, after fifteen years of struggle, and was victorious only five times in his whole life, so true is it that to the very end he had to beat down the resistance of the public ! After his death he enjoyed an extraordinary vogue: his plays were so completely in harmony with the new spirit that they were played over and over again in preference to all others. They gave rise to imitations which Aristotle criticized severely: “Formerly,” he says, “poets made their characters speak like citizens; today they are made to speak like rhetoricians.”38
An even more remarkable transformation took place in comedy. With Aristophanes it sought its subjects in public life, and in the parabasis subjected the spectators to a political harangue on the events of the day. Since it was reserved to Athenians by birth the Old Comedy could not have metics for authors. Metics, on the contrary, were the authors of plays of the Middle Comedy, and they took as characters popular types, craftsmen.39 Soon in the New Comedy even the representation of a social milieu was abandoned and the plot was centred on an incident of private life and was confined to the portrayal of character.
These changes were manifestations of a most important fact: it was no longer to poetry that the new generations looked for the expression of their ideas and the satisfaction of their intellectual needs, but to prose. As realists and individualists they needed a language free from all constraint, the language of everyday life. In the schools, where formerly only the poems of Homer were recited, the art of speaking was now learnt under the direction of rhetoricians ; at banquets where in earlier days elegies and skolia had been sung, men turned to political and philosophical discussions; in the great panegyrics where the rhapsodes used to declaim the epics, we see for the first time a Gorgias delivering, in pompous fashion, a discourse on questions of national interest. Plato, the greatest prose writer of his century and perhaps of all time, banished from his republic the greatest of all poets.
It was in the schools where sophists taught the art of disputation that minds were henceforth formed. Men went there to learn how to uphold a cause in the Assembly or the courts. Eloquence erected itself into a literary genre and a profession. Pericles was considered in his day the most perfect orator whom men had ever heard; of his speeches, however, there remain only a few of those superb thoughts and brilliant images which earned for him the nickname of the Olympian, a few rare specimens of those oratorical flashes which lingered in men’s memories.40 After his day speeches were written down either before or after they were delivered. Eloquence aimed at stimulating aesthetic emotions in the reader and the delights of amour-propre in the writer. It had, moreover, a practical utility; logographoi and orators lived by the speeches which they sold and the harangues which they had just uttered.
Since it was all-powerful in public life individualism necessarily influenced the conception of history. Isocrates claimed for prose writers the right, hitherto reserved for poets, to compose panegyrics on great men.41 Biographies multiplied, not only for the glorification of men who had actually been of importance, as for example Agesilaus or Euagoras, but even for the rendering of pious homage to young men of brilliant promise, such as Gryllus, son of Xenophon.42 In the hands of Philistus the history of Sicily was converted at one point into a history of Dionysius the Tyrant. Xenophon did not confine himself to weaving a crown in honour of his hero Agesilaus ; he centres the incidents of the Anabasis upon Cyrus the Younger, Clearchus and himself; even in such a connected story as that of the Hellenica he freely introduces personal elements. Character sketches, which in Thucydides were only rare and suggestive outlines, filled a large place in the work of his successors.43
Even philosophy ceased to be impersonal in form and became essentially concerned with upholding the rights of personality. By his method of discussion with the sophists, and his maieutic mode of inquiry applied to ordinary people, Socrates led his disciples to bring out his own ideas and their own in the dialogues, where the character of the disputants appears as in a play. Xenophon, no less as a philosopher than as an historian, is a portrait painter. Plato is it to perfection. When the Socratic doctrine substituted a practical study of the human soul in place of abstract speculations and ambitious theories of the universe it aimed at subordinating the desires of the individual to the good of the city, but it facilitated the spread of very different ideas. The schools of the sophists prepared the way for individualism. Thanks to them it was to be enabled to advertise itself in deed and to justify itself in theory. It was to bring about a fundamental revolution in men’s minds, to oppose the immutable and inevitable order of nature to the variable and contingent order of law, to reduce the law of the city to the position of pure convention and to authorize the philosopher to ignore it.44 “The useful, as it is determined by the laws, is a brake upon nature; the useful according to nature is unfettered” :45 that was the principle. Callicles, in the Gorgias, follows out the consequences. In nature the strong man raises himself above other men: what the law considers an injustice is absolute freedom for any man capable of rising above the common level. Law is made for the weak and in their interest ; but a single reasonable man is superior to a million irrational men, and it is for him to command and for them to obey. Since there are souls of masters and souls of slaves the only law which is legitimate is that which recognizes the superiority of the one over the other; true morality is the morality of the masters.46 To justify the domination of the powerful was, logically, to emancipate all individuals, to detach them from the State, to assign to them as the sole end of life the search for happiness; Aristippus of Cyrene and Diogenes the cynic only gave a general application to the ideas of a Callicles. Individualism sweeping all before it was to leave standing none of the conceptions from which the city derived its strength : it was tending already to legitimize the sovereignty of one man, tyrant or monarch, and to foreshadow the triumph of cosmopolitanism.