CHAPTER VI.

THE GREEKS.

"The taste, love, and intuition of the Beautiful stamped the Greeks above all nations." BULWER LYTTON, Athens, I. 112.

"Localism was the only form of political liberty they had ever known." - Industrial History of the Dutch, p. 239.

SECTION I.

THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE.

A LAND of beauty, yet of singular disunion, lay westward of any to which we have here returned. Towering peaks' thrust themselves skyward between broken valleys; or where mountains were distant, the plain was parted by a river or the land ploughed through by waters from the sea. Races of men on the same soil, a few leagues apart, were as completely separated as though they had been inhabitants of different worlds. Each country was divided into various cities and territories, in which its strength was often squandered and its sympathies were unceasingly confined. It seemed as if there had been given to each a separate patriotism, which grew into active rivalry with the other as soon as the sea was crossed or the mountain scaled. The stream 1 Αἰπεινὰ κάρηνα. Π., ΧΧ. 58.

will sometimes

pour

into many

channels the strength

";

that would be more majestically gathered into one; but it needs little love for nature to rejoice that the verdure of one meadow will be borne over a whole land with the caresses of the lighter-flowing currents to which the larger has yielded up its powers. With all its divisions, Greece possessed an unchanging beauty. Its atmosphere, glowing with southern hues, yet not consuming the earth it rather wrapped in haze, was full of visions to the upward eye. Grandeur and repose belonged to the mountains by which the land was raised nearer "the everlasting stars" softer scenes were crowded in the plains or by the streams; while changefulness and splendor crested the deep and dark-blue waves which leaped and shone and roared upon the steadfast shores. Nor was all this magnificence without generosity. The soil in most places rewarded its cultivators with abundant harvests of fruit and grain; while even from stony ground, where seeds would fall in vain, and from mountain fastnesses, were yielded metals, and those more precious marbles responsive to the thought as to the touch of man.

The Greeks lived in a favored land; they proved in antiquity to be a favored race. Their mingled dignity and restlessness were gifts of the nature in which their homes had been ordained;2 and so their

2

"Unrivalled Greece ! where every power benign Conspired to blow the flower of human

kind."

THOMSON.

itself, in the conclusion of an oration (Ctes. de Corona) by Eschines : Ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν, ὦ γῆ καὶ ἡλίε καὶ ἀρετὴ καὶ σύνεσις καὶ παιδεία, ᾗ διαγινώ

We have a witness from Greece σκομεν τὰ καλὰ καὶ τὰ αἰσχρά, βεβοή

longing after the beauty of the inward world came from the glories they beheld in their cradles, and among which they had their not quite hopeless tombs. But the same separations which were marked upon the earth could be traced among the habits and the hopes of the people. Into these, however, as into their affections for beauty, we must enter more particularly; for through these the sum and substance of Grecian liberty are to be comprehended.

The changes of centuries have not much lessened the admiration of mankind for the activity and the enterprise of the Greeks. The temples they built, the colonies they founded, the institutions they formed, are like monuments which generation after generation will still marvel at and examine, as if to discover the secret power by which they were contrived. No poetry will rob their Homer of our love; no philosophy, silent of Christian teachings, can ever breathe with serener truth than that of Socrates. Heathen history owes its best pages to Thucydides ; heathen justice still takes the life of Aristides for its best example. Eloquence, so far as it depends on language, cannot rise higher than with Demosthenes; and art, so far as it consists in form and execution, has never even equalled the long-lived creations of Phidias and the nameless sculptor of the Apollo. It would be vain to enumerate these names, were they

Oŋka kai eiρnka, “I thus have pleaded and have spoken, O Earth and Sun and Valor and Understanding and Education," etc. ;· as if the beauties of the world and the virtues of men

were inseparable. Becker, in a note to his Charicles (p. 38, Eng. trans.), mentions a few other passages of the same kind. Cf. Müller, Anc. Art., Sect. 435.

not sufficiently familiar to represent the ideality and the effort of a people in love with beauty. There are others, suggesting different associations, yet readily associated with these. The love of beauty is not alone the love of things material, or even intellectual, but of things moral, the most beautiful of all. Imperfectly as these could be known in Greece, they were not neglected in the abundance of other objects of cultivation and exertion. The dangers and the sacrifices of Aristomenes for the sake of Messenia, the death of Leonidas and his three hundred, faithful to iron-hearted Sparta, the devotion and the triumph of Thrasybulus over his evil-minded countrymen at Athens, are all illustrations of the love for home and law and liberty, which are more truly parts of the one great principle of beauty than poetry or policy or art; they are the human groundwork of a Divine morality.

With signs so universal of spirit and aspiration are blended other signs of separation and imperfection. Each nation lived according to its own law, with which there was little harmony in any other law. Each people pursued their occupations or their festivals, except in rare instances, as if the world were all too narrow for sacrifices or labors besides their own. The very devotion to whatever was accounted beautiful engendered strife. The ideal in one place was not the ideal of another place; and they who upheld a peculiar principle of their own were set against others to whom the same principle was unwelcome or unknown. Some sort of contention became a part

and parcel of every earnest duty. It did not spring from knowledge of truth, nor yet from hatred of error, but was aroused by a spirit of defiance against any difference of opinion or any variance of action. It now appears-it may have appeared of old - that the cultivation peculiar to the different inhabitants of Greece was quickened by the conflicts in which their powers were arrayed on opposite sides. Through the very narrowness of their divisions, the energies of each race or of each state were more generally excited and more actively employed. Each was a household, in which the youngest and the weakest had their parts, rather than a nation, in which the strongest alone were able to protect themselves and to scourge their inferiors. There were evil passions, indeed, in every house and every city. Fathers and sons were often severed; masters and slaves were always enemies; one class and another were seldom at peace. Nor was the town or the dwelling haunted only within its walls. A whole territory was similarly infested; and the nation, divided against itself, was armed against its neighbours, perhaps its kinsmen. Greece became a battle-field, in which the prize was not the perfection of any of its hostile races so much as the mastery of one over another people.

Yet there were great blessings to Greece and to the world evolved from out her battles. It cannot be too strongly urged, that the results to be gained through struggles in arms are doubly hazarded; yet

3 This ought to be very clear. Such reasoning as Cousin's (Cours,