IV The Literary Expression of the Plot

And now, after having suggested a reading of the plot, it is time to let the actors speak for themselves. There is only space to quote half a dozen passages, but they have been chosen to illustrate the critical scenes and situations in the drama as it has been sketched out, and they may persuade the reader that there is something to be said for the present interpretation.

We shall not dwell on the period I have called the first act—that is, the period before 431 B. C. But the reader is recommended, again, not to lay aside the Greek poets when he takes up the Greek historians. Homer will reveal more of the opening scenes than Herodotus; and the exaltation of spirit produced by the repulse of the Persians, and expressed institutionally in the foundation of the Delian League, can hardly be realized emotionally without the poetry of Aeschylus. But the philosophers and scientists are indispensable too. Professor Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy, or his Greek Philosophy from Thales to Plato, throws light on history and not merely on the Greek theory of knowledge. And the reader should make acquaintance with the little work on ‘Atmospheres, Waters, and Localities’ emanating from the Hippokratean school of medicine. It is only thirty-eight pages in the Teubner text (Hippocratis Opera, vol. i), and it gives clearer expression than Herodotus to the fifth-century scientific point of view. Here is one passage which might have been written in Victorian England. The writer is describing a peculiar disease prevalent among the nomads of southern Russia. ‘The natives’, he remarks, ‘believe that this disease is sent by God, and they reverence and worship its victims, in fear of being stricken by it themselves. I too am quite ready to admit that these phenomena are caused by God, but I take the same view about all phenomena and hold that no single phenomenon is more or less divine in origin than any other. All are uniform and all may be divine, but each phenomenon obeys a law, and natural law knows no exceptions.’

It is hard to leave this first act of the tragedy. It is a triumph of youth, and the phrase in which Herodotus sums up the early history of Sparta expresses the prevailing spirit of early Hellenic civilization. Ανα τε εδραμον και ευθενηθησαν: ‘They shot up and throve.’ But there is another phrase in Herodotus which announces the second act—an ominous phrase which came so natural to him that one may notice about a dozen instances of it in his history. Εδει γαρ τω δεινι γενεσθαι κακως: ‘Evil had to befall so-and-so, and therefore’—the story of a catastrophe follows in each case. The thought behind the phrase is expressed in Solon’s words to Croesus (Herodotus, Bk. I, ch. 32): ‘Croesus, I know that God is ever envious and disordering’ (ταραχωδες), ‘and you ask me about the destiny of man!’

Note the epithet translated ‘disordering’; we shall meet the word ταραχη again. It is the bitter phrase of a man who lived on from the great age into the war, but not so bitter as the truth which the writer could not bring himself wholly to express. ‘No single phenomenon’, as contemporary Greek science realized, ‘is more or less divine than any other’, and the ‘envious and disordering’ power, which wrecked Greek civilization, was not an external force, but the very spirit of man by which that civilization had been created. There is a puzzling line in Homer which is applied once or twice to features in a landscape—for instance, to a river: ‘The gods call it Xanthos, mankind Skamandros.’ So we might say of the downfall of Greece: the Greeks attributed it to the malignity of God, but the divine oracles gave a different answer.

Why did the Confederacy of Delos break down and Greece lose her youth in a ruinous war? Because of the evil in the hearts of men—the envy aroused by the political and commercial greatness of Athens in the governing classes of Sparta and Corinth; and the covetousness aroused by sudden greatness in the Athenians, tempting their statesmen to degrade the presidency of a free confederacy into a dominion of Athens over Greece, and tempting the Athenian proletariat, and the proletariat in the confederate states, to misuse democracy for the exploitation of the rich by the poor. Envy and covetousness begat injustice, and injustice disloyalty. The city-states, in their rivalry for dominion or their resentment against the domineering of one state over another, forgot their loyalty to the common weal of Greece and fought each other for empire or liberty. And the wealthy and well-born citizens forgot their loyalty to the city in their blind, rancorous feud against the proletariat that was stripping them of property and power, and betrayed their community to foreign enemies.

‘Strange how mortals blame the gods. They say that evil is our handiwork, when in truth they bring their sufferings on themselves. By their own folly they force the hand of fate. See, now, how Aigisthos forced it in taking the wedded wife of Atreides and slaying her lord when he returned, yet he had sheer destruction before his eyes, for we ourselves had forewarned him not to slay the king nor wed his wife, or vengeance would come by Atreides’ son Orestes, whene’er he should grow to manhood and long for his home. So spake our messenger, but with all his wisdom he did not soften the heart of Aigisthos, and now he has paid in full’ (Odyssey, a 32-43).

These lines from the first canto of the Odyssey were imagined by a generation which could still afford to err, but as Greece approached her hour of destiny, her prophetic inspiration grew clearer. The poets of the sixth century were haunted more insistently than the Homeridai by the possibilities of disaster inherent in success of every kind—in personal prosperity, in military victory, and in the social triumph of civilization. They traced the mischief to an aberration of the human spirit under the shock of sudden, unexpected attainment, and they realized that both the accumulated achievement of generations and the greater promise of the future might be lost irretrievably by failure at this critical moment. ‘Surfeit (κορος) breeds sin ὑβρις when prosperity visits unbalanced minds.’ In slightly different words, the proverb recurs in the collections of verses attributed to Theognis and to Solon. Its maker refrained from adding what was in his and his hearers’ thoughts, that ὑβρις, once engendered, breeds αιη—the complete and certain destruction into which the sinner walks with unseeing eyes. But the whole moral mystery, to its remorseless end, was uttered again and again in passionate words by Aeschylus, who consciously discarded the primitive magical determinism in which Herodotus afterwards vainly sought relief.

Φιλει δε τικτειν ὑβρις
μεν παλαια νεα—
ζουσαν εν κακοις βροτων
ὑβρις τοτ’ η τóθ’, ὁτε το κυριον μολη
φαος τοκου,
δαιμονα τ’ εταν, αμαχον, απολεμον,
ανιερον θρασος, μελαι—
νας μελαθροισιν Ατας,
ειδομενας τοκευσιν.

{Philei de tiktein hubris
men palaia nea—
zousan en kakois brotôn
hubris tot’ ê tóth’, hote to kyrion molê
phaos tokou,
daimona t’ etan, amachon, apolemon,
anieron thrasos, melai—
nas melathroisin Atas,
eidomenas tokeusin.}

But Old Sin loves, when comes the hour again,
To bring forth New,
Which laugheth lusty amid the tears of men;
Yea, and Unruth, his comrade, wherewith none
May plead nor strive, which dareth on and on,
Knowing not fear nor any holy thing;
Two fires of darkness in a house, born true,
Like to their ancient spring.
(Agamemnon, vv. 763-71, Murray’s transl.)

The poet of the crowning victory over Persia was filled with awe, as well as exultation, at the possibilities for good or evil which his triumphant generation held in their hands. Were they true metal or base? The times would test them, but he had no doubt about the inexorable law.

Ου γαρ εστιν επαλξις
πλουτου προς κορον ανδρι
λακτισαντι μεγαν δικης
βωμον εις αφανειαν.

{Ou gar estin epalxis
ploutou pros koron andri
laktisanti megan dikês
bômon eis aphaneian.}

Never shall state nor gold
Shelter his heart from aching
Whoso the Altar of Justice old
Spurneth to night unwaking.
(Agamemnon, vv. 381-4, Murray’s transl.)

The Agamemnon was written when Athens stood at the height of her glory and her power, and before her sons, following the devices of their hearts, ‘like a boy chasing a wingèd bird’, had set a fatal stumbling-block in the way of their city, or smirched her with an intolerable stain. The generation of Marathon foreboded the catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War, yet the shock, when it came, was beyond their powers of imagination, and the effect of it on the mind of Greece was first expressed by the generation which was smitten by the war in early manhood. This is how it was felt by Thucydides (iii. 82):

‘So the class-war at Korkyra grew more and more savage, and it made a particular impression because it was the first outbreak of an upheaval that spread in time through almost the whole of Greek society. In every state there were conflicts of class, and the leaders of the respective parties now procured the intervention of the Athenians or the Lakedaimonians on their side. In peace-time they would have had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to call in the foreigner, but now there was the war, and it was easy for any party of violence to get their opponents crushed and themselves into power by an alliance with one of the belligerents. This recrudescence of class-war brought one calamity after another upon the states of Greece—calamities that occur and will continue to occur as long as human nature remains what it is, however they may be modified or occasionally mitigated by changes of circumstance. Under the favourable conditions of peace-time, communities and individuals do not have their hands forced by the logic of events, and can therefore act up to a higher standard. But war strips away all the margins of ordinary life and breaks in character to circumstance by its brutal training. So the states were torn by the class-war, and the sensation made by each outbreak had a sinister effect on the next—in fact, there was something like a competition in perfecting the fine art of conspiracies and atrocities....

(iii. 83) ‘Thus the class-war plunged Greek society into every kind of moral evil, and honesty, which is the chief constituent of idealism, was laughed out of existence in the prevailing atmosphere of hostility and suspicion. No argument was cogent enough and no pledge solemn enough to reconcile opponents. The only argument that appealed to the party momentarily in power was the unlikelihood of their remaining there long and the consequent advisability of taking no risks with their enemies. And the stupider the combatants, the greater their chances of survival, just because they were terrified at their deficiencies, expected to be outwitted and outmanœuvred, and therefore plunged recklessly into action, while their superiors in intellect, who trusted to their wits to protect them and disdained practical precautions, were often caught defenceless and brought to destruction.’

There is the effect of the great Greek war upon the first generation. Thucydides, of course, had a sensitive and emotional temperament. He is always controlling himself and reining himself in. But one is struck by an outburst of the same feeling in a younger man, Xenophon, who was ordinarily in harmony with his age and was probably rather unimaginative and self-complacent by nature. The war had given Xenophon his opportunity as a soldier and a writer. He was not inclined to quarrel with the ‘envious and disordering’ powers that had ruined Greek civilization. But in the last paragraph of the History of his Own Times he is carried away, for he has just been describing the battle of Mantinea (362 B. C.), in which he had lost his son.

‘The result of the battle’, he writes, ‘disappointed every one’s expectations. Almost the whole of Greece had mobilized on one side or the other, and it was taken for granted that if it came to an action, the victors would be able to do what they liked and the vanquished would be at their mercy. But Providence so disposed it that both sides ... claimed the victory and yet neither had gained a foot of territory, a single city or a particle of power beyond what they had possessed before the battle. On the contrary, there was more unsettlement and disorder (ταραχη) in Greece after the battle than before it. But I do not propose to carry my narrative further and will leave the sequel to any other historian who cares to record it.’ (Hellenica, vii. 5 fin.)

Space forbids quotation from Plato, but the reader is recommended, while studying his metaphysics for his philosophy, to note his moods and emotions for the light they throw upon the history of his lifetime. Plato’s long life—427 to 347 B. C.—practically coincided with the first phase of the second act of the tragedy—the series of wars that began in 431 B. C., and that had reduced the Greek city-states to complete disunion and exhaustion by 355. Plato belonged to the cultured governing class which was hit hardest by these first disasters. At the age of twenty-nine, after witnessing the downfall of Athens, he had to witness the judicial murder of Sokrates—the greatest man of the older generation, who had been appreciated and loved by Plato and his friends. Plato’s own most promising pupil, whom he had marked out for his successor, was killed in action in a particularly aimless recrudescence of the war. Plato’s political disillusionment and perversity are easy to understand. But it is curious and interesting to watch the clash between his political bitterness and his intellectual serenity. In the intellectual and artistic sphere—as a writer, musician, mathematician, metaphysician—he stood consciously at the zenith of Greek history; but whenever he turned to politics he seems to have felt that the spring had gone out of the year. He instinctively antedated the setting of his dialogues. The characters nearly all belong to the generation of Sokrates, which had grown to manhood before the war and whose memories conjured up the glory that the war had extinguished. Note, also, his ‘other-worldliness’, for it is a feature that comes into Greek civilization with him and gradually permeates it. He turns from science to theology, from the world of time and change to the world of archetypes or ideas. He turns from the social religion of the city-state to a personal religion for which he takes symbols from primitive mythology. He turns from politics to utopias. But Plato only lived to see the first phase of the catastrophe. As we watch the remainder of this second act—those four terrible centuries that followed the year 431 B. C.—there come tidings of calamity after calamity, like the messages of disaster in the Book of Job, and as the world crumbles, people tend more and more to lay up their treasure elsewhere. In the Laws, Plato places his utopia no farther away than Crete. Two centuries later the followers of Aristonikos the Bolshevik, outlawed by the cities of Greece and Asia, proclaim themselves citizens of the City of the Sun. Two centuries later still, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, despairing of this world, pray for its destruction by fire to make way for the Kingdom of Heaven.

Plato’s state of mind gives the atmosphere of the first phase after the catastrophe. For the second phase—the conquest of the East and the struggle for the spoils—the reader may be referred to Mr. Edwyn Bevan’s Lectures on the Stoics and Sceptics and to Professor Gilbert Murray’s Conway Memorial lecture on The Stoic Philosophy. They will show him a system of philosophy which is no longer a pure product of speculation but is primarily a moral shelter erected hastily to meet the storms of life. The third phase—the rally of civilization in the middle of the third century B. C.—is mirrored in Plutarch’s lives of the Spartan kings Agis and Kleomenes. Any one who reads them will feel the gallantry of this rally and the pathos of its failure. And then comes the fourth phase—the Roman wars against the other great powers of the Mediterranean world. The Hannibalic war in Italy was, very probably, the most terrible war that there has ever been, not excepting the recent war in Europe. The horror of that war haunted later generations, and its mere memory made oblivion seem a desirable release from an intolerable world.

Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum,
quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur.
et velut anteacto nil tempore sensimus aegri,
ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis,
omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu
horrida contremuere sub altis aetheris oris,
in dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum
omnibus humanis esset terraque marique,
sic, ubi non erimus, cum corporis atque animai
discidium fuerit quibus e sumus uniter apti,
scilicet haud nobis quicquam, qui non erimus tum,
accidere omnino poterit sensumque movere,
non si terra mari miscebitur et mare caelo.

That is a passage of Lucretius (iii. 830-842) which follows upon an elaborate argument to prove that death destroys personality and that the soul is not immortal. Here is an attempt at a translation:

‘So death is nothing to us and matters nothing to us, since we have proved that the soul is not immortal. And as in time past we felt no ill, when the Phoenicians were pouring in to battle on every front, when the world rocked with the shock and tumult of war and shivered from centre to firmament, when all mankind on sea and land must fall under the victor’s empire and victory was in doubt—so, when we have ceased to be, when body and soul, whose union is our being, have been parted, then nothing can touch us—we shall not be—and nothing can make us feel, no, not if earth is confounded with sea and sea with heaven.’

Lucretius wrote that about a hundred and fifty years after Hannibal evacuated Italy, but the horror is still vivid in his mind, and his poetry arouses it in our minds as we listen. The writer will never forget how those lines kept running in his head during the spring of 1918.

But the victors suffered with the vanquished in the common ruin of civilization. The whole Mediterranean world, and the devastated area in Italy most of all, was shaken by the economic and social revolutions which the Roman wars brought in their train. The proletariat was oppressed to such a degree that the unity of society was permanently destroyed and Greek civilization, after being threatened with a violent extinction by Bolshevik outbreaks—the slave wars in Sicily, the insurrection of Aristonikos and the massacres of Mithradates in Anatolia, the outbreaks of Spartakos and Catilina in Italy—was eventually supplanted by a rival civilization of the proletariat—the Christian Church. The revolutionary last phase in the second act—the final phase before the foundation of the Empire—has left its expression in the cry of the Son of Man: ‘The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.’ It was one of those anonymous phrases that are in all men’s mouths because they express what is in all men’s hearts. Tiberius Gracchus used it in his public speeches at Rome; two centuries later it reappears in the discourses of Jesus of Nazareth.

Ergo inter sese paribus concurrere telis
Romanas acies iterum videre Philippi,
nec fuit indignum superis bis sanguine nostro
Emathiam et latos Haemi pinguescere campos....
Di patrii, Indigetes, et Romule, Vestaque mater
quae Tuscum Tiberim et Romana Palatia servas,
hunc saltem everso iuvenem succurrere saeclo
ne prohibete. satis iam pridem sanguine nostro
Laomedonteae luimus periuria Troiae....
vicinae ruptis inter se legibus urbes
arma ferunt; saevit toto Mars impius orbe;
ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae,
addunt in spatio, et frustra retinacula tendens
fertur equis auriga neque audit currus habenas.
(Georgics, i. 489 seqq.)

‘Therefore Philippi saw Roman armies turn their swords against each other a second time in battle, and the gods felt no pity that Emathia and the broad plains of Haemus should twice be fattened with our blood....

‘Gods of our fathers, gods of our country, god of our city, goddess of our hearths who watchest over Tuscan Tiber and Roman Palatine, forbid not this last saviour to succour our fallen generation. Our blood has flowed too long. We have paid in full for the sins of our forefathers—the broken faith of ancient Troy....

‘The bonds are broken between neighbour cities and they meet in arms. Ungodly war rages the world over. The chariots launched on the race gather speed as they go; vainly dragging on the reins the driver is swept away by his steeds and the team heeds not the bridle.’

It is a prayer for the lifting of the curse, and this time the ‘envious and disordering’ powers gave ear. The charioteer regained control, and we are carried on to the third act of the tragedy, in which no small part of its beauty and a very great part of its significance is to be found. The imperial peace could not save the body of Greek civilization—the four centuries of war had inflicted mortal wounds; but possibly it saved its soul. Although Augustus had not the abilities of Caesar, he felt and pitied the sorrows of the world, and he succeeded in expressing the pity and repentance, the ruthfulness for and piety towards the past, which were astir in the spirits of his generation. But what phrase is adequate to characterize the Empire? The words ‘Decline and Fall’ suggest themselves, but how should they be applied? Gibbon took the second century of the Empire, the age of the Antonines, as the Golden Age of the Ancient World, and traced the decline and fall of the Empire from the death of Marcus Aurelius. On the other hand, if the present reading of the plot is right, the fatal catastrophe occurred six centuries earlier, in the year 431 B. C., and the Empire itself was the decline and fall of Greek civilization. But was it only that? One is apt to think so when one reads the diary of Marcus Aurelius, and pictures him in his quarters at Carnuntum, fighting finely but hopelessly on two fronts—against the barbarians on the Danube and the sadness in his own soul.

‘Human life! Its duration is momentary, its substance in perpetual flux, its senses dim, its physical organism perishable, its consciousness a vortex, its destiny dark, its repute uncertain—in fact, the material element is a rolling stream, the spiritual element dreams and vapour, life a war and a sojourning in a far country, fame oblivion. What can see us through? One thing and one only—philosophy, and that means keeping the spirit within us unspoiled and undishonoured, not giving way to pleasure or pain, never acting unthinkingly or deceitfully or insincerely, and never being dependent on the moral support of others. It also means taking what comes contentedly as all part of the process to which we owe our own being; and, above all, it means facing death calmly—taking it simply as a dissolution of the atoms of which every living organism is composed. Their perpetual transformation does not hurt the atoms, so why should one mind the whole organism being transformed and dissolved? It is a law of nature, and natural law can never be wrong.’ (Μáρκος Αντωνινος εις εαυτóν, ii fin.)

But after quoting Marcus Aurelius, the first citizen of the Empire, it is necessary to add a quotation from Paul of Tarsos, a citizen who has as good a claim as any other to be heard:

‘“How are the dead raised up? With what body do they come?” Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die.... It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.’ ...

It startles us to be reminded that these two actors appeared on the stage in the same act of the drama, and that Paul actually played his part a century before Marcus played his. Paul’s voice suggests not only a younger generation but quite a different play. His thought in the lines just quoted is inspired by a predecessor whom Marcus regarded as one of the innumerable prophets of the proletariat. ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ The saying was included in the miscellaneous traditions about Jesus of Nazareth which were passing from mouth to mouth among the illiterate masses, but which had not begun to excite the curiosity of the educated classes in Marcus’s day. What would the scholar have made of it if a collection of these traditions had fallen under his eye, scrawled on bad paper in barbarous Greek? Little enough, for he would have missed the whole background of his own sentiment and thought, which was nothing less than the background of Greek civilization. Great literary memories crowd the brief passage of his diary quoted above—Epiktetos and Lucretius and the Stoa, Plato and Sokrates, Demokritos and the Hippokratean school of medicine from which we took our first quotation, and simpler minds and more primitive artists in the dim generations behind. We are carried right back through the tragedy at which we have been looking on. The two men are worlds apart, in spite of the fact that their propositions, when we strip them naked, are much the same. ‘The organism is transformed and dissolved.’—‘That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.’ They are both representing death as a phase in the process of nature, but it is not till we grasp the similarity of the thought that we fully realize the difference in the outlook and the emotion.

Under the smooth surface of the Empire there was a great gulf fixed between the ‘bourgeois’ society of the city-states and the descendants of the slaves imported during the Roman Wars; but the Empire, by gradually alleviating the material condition of the proletariat, insensibly affected their point of view. The development of their religion—the one inalienable possession carried by the slaves from their Oriental homes—is an index of the psychological change. In the last phase of the Second Act, the ‘Red Guards’ of Sicily and Anatolia had been led by prophets and preachers of their Oriental gods. Their religion had lent itself to their revolutionary state of mind. But under the Empire, as descendants of the plantation-slaves succeeded in purchasing their freedom and forming a new class of shopkeepers and clerks, their religion correspondingly reflected their rise in the world. They remained indifferent, if not hostile, to the Imperial Hellenic tradition, but they began to aspire to a kingdom of their own in this world as well as in the next. The force which had broken out desperately in the crazy wonder-working of Eunous of Enna and had then inspired the ‘other-worldly’ exaltation of Paul of Tarsos, was soon conducted into the walls of chapels, and the local associations of Christian chapel-goers were steadily linked up into a federation so powerfully organized that the Imperial federation of city-states had eventually to choose between going into partnership with it or being supplanted. Thus the empire of which Marcus and Paul were citizens was more than the third act in the tragedy of Ancient Greece. While it retarded the inevitable dissolution of one civilization it conceived its successor, and when, after Marcus’s death, imperial statesmanship failed, and the ancient organism long preserved by its skill at last broke down, the shock did not extinguish new and old together, but brought the new life to birth. By the seventh century after Christ, when Ancient Greek civilization may be said finally to have dissolved, our own civilization was ready to ‘shoot up and thrive’ and repeat the tragedy of mankind.

The writer can best express his personal feeling about the Empire in a parable. It was like the sea round whose shores its network of city-states was strung. The Mediterranean seems at first sight a poor substitute for the rivers that have given their waters to make it. Those were living waters, whether they ran muddy or clear; the sea seems just salt and still and dead. But as soon as we study the sea, we find movement and life there also. There are silent currents circulating perpetually from one part to another, and the surface-water that seems to be lost by evaporation is not really lost, but will descend in distant places and seasons, with its bitterness all distilled away, as life-giving rain. And as these surface-waters are drawn off into the clouds, their place is taken by lower layers continually rising from the depths. The sea itself is in constant and creative motion, but the influence of this great body of water extends far beyond its shores. One finds it softening the extremes of temperature, quickening the vegetation, and prospering the life of animals and men, in the distant heart of continents and among peoples that have never heard its name.

Arnold Toynbee.