  What was the special gift of Greece to the world? The answer of the Greeks themselves is unexpected, yet it is as clear as a trumpet: Eleutheria, Freedom. The breath of Eleutheria fills the sail of Aeschylus’ great verse, it blows through the pages of Herodotus, awakens fierce regrets in Demosthenes and generous memories in Plutarch. “Art, philosophy, science,” the Greeks say, “yes, we have given all these; but our best gift, from which all the others were derived, was Eleutheria.” Now what did they mean by that? They meant the Reign of Law. Aeschylus says of them in The Persians: Atossa. Who is their shepherd over them and lord of their host? Chorus. Of no man are they called the slaves or subjects. Now hear Herodotus amplifying and explaining Aeschylus. For though they are free, yet are they not free in all things. For they have a lord over them, even Law, whom they fear far more than thy people fear thee. At least they do what that lord biddeth them, and what he biddeth is still the same, to wit that they flee not before the face of any multitude Eleutheria the Reign of Law or Nomos. The word Nomos begins with the meaning “custom” or “convention,” and ends by signifying that which embodies as far as possible the universal and eternal principles of justice. To write the history of it is to write the history of Greek civilization. The best we can do is to listen to the Greeks themselves explaining what they were fighting for in fighting for Eleutheria. They will not put us off with abstractions. No one who has read The Persians forgets the live and leaping voice that suddenly cries out before the meeting of the ships at Salamis: Onward, Sons of the Hellenes! Free your country, free your children, your wives, your fathers’ tombs and seats of your fathers’ gods! All hangs now on your fighting! This, then, when it came to action, is what the Greeks meant by the Reign of Law. It will not seem so puzzling if you put it in this way: that what they fought for was the right to govern themselves. Here as elsewhere we may observe how the struggle of Greek and Barbarian fills with palpitating life such words as Freedom, which to dull men have been apt to seem abstract and to sheltered people faded. For the Barbarians had not truly laws at all. How are laws possible where “all are slaves save one,” and he responsible to nobody? So the fight for Freedom becomes a fight for Law, that no man may become another’s master, but all be subject equally to the Law, “whose service is perfect freedom.” That conception was wrought out in the stress of conflict with the Barbarians, culminating in the Persian danger. On that point it is well to prepare our minds by an admission. The quarrel was never a simple one of right and wrong. Persia at least was in some respects in advance of the Greece she fought at Salamis; and not only in material splendour. That is now clear to every historian; it never was otherwise to the Greeks themselves. Possessing or possessed by the kind of imagination which compels a man to understand his enemy, they saw much to admire in the Persians—their hardihood, their chivalry, their munificence, their talent for government. The Greeks heard with enthusiasm (which was part at least literary) the scheme of education for young nobles—“to ride a horse, to shoot with the bow, and to speak the truth!” In fact the two peoples, although they never realized it, were neither in race nor in speech very remote from one another. But it was the destiny of the Persians to succeed to an empire essentially Asiatic and so to become the leaders and champions of a culture alien to Greece and to us. In such a cause their very virtues made them the more dangerous. Here was no possible compromise. Persia and Greece stood for something more than two political systems; the European mind, the European way of thinking and feeling about things, the soul of Europe was at stake. There is no help for it; in such a quarrel we must take sides. Let us look first at the Persian side. The phrase I quoted about all men in Persia being slaves save one is not a piece of Greek rhetoric; it was the official language of the empire. The greatest officer No man might enter the sacred presence without leave. Whoever was admitted must prostrate himself to the ground. The emperor sat on a sculptured throne holding in his hand a sceptre tipped with an apple of gold. He was clad in gorgeous trousers and gorgeous Median robe. On his head was the peaked kitaris girt with the crown, beneath which the formally curled hair flowed down to mingle with the great beard. He had chains of gold upon him and golden bracelets, a golden zone engirdled him, from his ears hung rings of gold. Behind the throne stood an attendant with a fan against the flies and held his mouth lest his breath should touch the royal person. Before the throne stood the courtiers, their hands concealed, their eyelids stained with kohl, their lips never smiling, their painted faces never moving. Greece saved us from all that. The King had many wives and a great harem of concubines—one for each day of the year. You remember the Book of Esther. Ahasuerus is the Greek Xerxes. There is in Herodotus a story of that court which, however unauthentic it may be in details, has a clear evidential value. On his return from Greece Xerxes rested at Sardis, the ancient capital of Lydia. There he fell in love with the wife of his brother Masistes. Unwilling to take her by force, he resorted to policy. He betrothed his son Darius to Artaynte, the daughter of Masistes, and took her with him to Susa (the Shushan of Esther), hoping to draw her mother to his great palace there, “where were white, green and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble.” In Susa, however, the King experienced a new sensation and fell in love with Artaynte—who returned his affection. Now Amestris the Queen had woven with her own hands a wonderful garment for her lord, who inconsiderately put it on to pay his next visit to Artaynte. Of course Artaynte asked for it, of course in the end she got it, and of course she made a point of wearing it. When Amestris heard of this, she blamed, says Herodotus, not the girl but her mother. With patient dissimulation she did nothing until the Feast of the Birthday of the King, when he cannot refuse a request. Then for her present she asked the wife of Masistes. The King, who understood her purpose, tried to save the victim; but too late. Amestris had in the meanwhile sent the King’s soldiers for the woman; and when she had her in her power she cut away her breasts and threw them to the dogs, cut off her It may be thought that the Persian monarchy cannot fairly be judged by the conduct of a Xerxes. The reply to this would seem to be that it was Xerxes the Greeks had to fight. But let us choose another case, Artaxerxes II, whose life the gentle Plutarch selected to write because of the mildness and democratic quality which distinguished him from others of his line. Yet the Life of Artaxerxes would be startling in a chronicle of the Italian Renaissance. The story which I will quote from it was probably derived from the Persian History of Ktesias, who was a Greek physician at the court of Artaxerxes. This Ktesias, as Plutarch himself tells us, was a highly uncritical person, but after all, as Plutarch goes on to say, he was not likely to be wrong about things that were happening before his eyes. Here then is the story, a little abridged. She—that is, Parysatis the queen-mother—perceived that he—Artaxerxes the King—had a violent passion for Atossa, one of his daughters.... When Parysatis came to suspect this, she made more of the child than ever, and to Artaxerxes she praised her beauty and her royal and splendid ways. At last she persuaded him to marry the maid and make her his true wife, disregarding the opinions and laws (Nomoi) of the Greeks; she said that he himself had been appointed by the god (Ahuramazda) a law unto the Persians and judge of honour and dishonour.... Atossa her father so loved in wedlock that, when leprosy had overspread her body, he felt no whit of loathing thereat, but praying for her sake to Hera (Anaitis?) he did obeisance to that goddess only, touching the Artaxerxes afterwards took into his harem another of his daughters. The religion of Zarathustra sanctioned that. It also sanctioned marriage with a mother. According to Persian notions both Xerxes and Artaxerxes behaved with perfect correctness. The royal blood was too near the divine to mingle with baser currents. There is no particular reason for believing that Xerxes was an exceptionally vicious person, while Artaxerxes seemed comparatively virtuous. It was the system that was all wrong. What are you to expect of a prince, knowing none other law than his own will, and surrounded from his infancy by venomous intriguing women and eunuchs? Babylon alone used to send five hundred boys yearly to serve as eunuchs.... I think we may now leave the Persians. Hear again Phocylides: “A little well-ordered city on a rock is better than frenzied Nineveh.” The old poet means a city of the Greek type, and by “well-ordered” he means governed by a law which guarantees the liberties of all in restricting the privileges of each. This, the secret of true freedom, was what the Barbarian never understood. Sperthias and Boulis, two rich and noble Spartans, offered to yield themselves up to the just anger of Xerxes, whose envoys had been flung to their death in a deep water-tank. On the road to Susa they were entertained by the Persian grandee Hydarnes, who So when Alexander King of Macedon came to Athens with a proposal from Xerxes that in return for an alliance with them he would grant the Athenians new territories to dwell in free, and would rebuild the temples he had burned; and when the Spartan envoys had pleaded with them to do no such thing as the King proposed, the Athenians made reply. We know as well as thou that the might of the Persian is many times greater than ours, so that thou needest not to charge us with forgetting that. Yet shall we fight for freedom as we may. To make terms with the Barbarian seek not thou to persuade us, nor shall we be persuaded. And now tell Mardonios that Athens says: “So long as the sun keeps the path where now he goeth, never shall we make compact with Xerxes; but shall go forth to do battle with him, putting our trust in the gods that fight for us and in the mighty dead, whose dwelling-places and holy things he hath contemned and burned with fire.” This was their answer to Alexander; but to the Spartans ?? ?a??? ?? ????, “it would not be well.” When I was writing about Greek simplicity I should have remembered this passage. But our present theme is the meaning of Eleutheria. “Our first duty,” say the Athenians, “is to avenge our gods and heroes, whose temples have been desecrated.” Such language must ring strangely in our ears until we have reflected a good deal about the character of ancient religion. To the Greeks of Xerxes’ day religion meant, in a roughly comprehensive phrase, the consecration of the citizen to the service of the State. When the Athenians speak of the gods and heroes, whose temples have been burned, they are thinking of the gods and heroes of Athens, which had been sacked by the armies of Mardonios; and they are thinking chiefly of Athena and Erechtheus. Now who was Athena? You may read in books that she was “the patron-goddess of Athens.” But As for Erechtheus, he was the great Athenian “hero.” The true nature of a “hero” is an immensely controversial matter; but what we are concerned with here is the practical question, what the ancients thought. They, rightly or wrongly, normally thought of their “heroes” as famous ancestors. It was as their chief ancestor that the Athenians regarded and worshipped Erechtheus. Cecrops was earlier, but for some reason not so worshipful; Theseus was more famous, but later, and even something of an alien, since he appears to come originally from Troezen. Thus it was chiefly about Erechtheus as “the father of his people,” rather than about maiden Athena, that all that sentiment, so intense in ancient communities, of the common blood and its sacred obligations entwined itself. This old king of primeval Athens claimed his share of the piety due to the dead of So Themistocles felt when after Salamis he said: It is not we who have wrought this deed, but the gods and heroes, who hated that one man should become lord both of Europe and of Asia; unholy and sinful, who held things sacred and things profane in like account, burning temples and casting down the images of the gods; who also scourged the sea and cast fetters upon it. And it is this feeling which gives so singular a beauty and charm to the story of Dikaios. “Dikaios the son of Theokydes, an Athenian then in Athena, the Mother-Maid Demeter-Persephone with the mystic child Iacchus, Boreas “the son-in-law of Erechtheus,” whose breath dispersed the enemy ships under Pelion and Kaphareus—of such sort are “the gods who fight for us” and claim the love and service of Athens in return. It is well to remember attentively this religious element in ancient patriotism, so large an element that one may say with scarcely any exaggeration at all that for the ancients patriotism was a religion. Therefore is Eleutheria, the patriot’s ideal, a religion too. Such instincts and beliefs are interwoven in one sacred indissoluble bond uniting the Gods and men, the very hills and rivers of Greece against the foreign master. Call this if you will a mystical and confused emotion; but do not deny its beauty or underestimate its tremendous force. But here (lest in discussing a sentiment which may be thought confused we ourselves fall into confusion) let us emphasize a distinction, which has indeed been already indicated. Greek patriotism was as wide as Greece; but on the other hand its intensity was in inverse ratio to its extension. Greek patriotism was primarily a local thing, and it needed the pressure of a manifest national danger to lift it to a wider outlook. That was true in the main and of the average man, although every generation produced certain superior spirits, statesmen or philosophers, whose thought was not particularist. It was this home-savour which gave to ancient patriotism its special salt and pungency. When the Athenians in the speech I quoted say that their first duty is to avenge their gods, they are thinking more of Athens than of Greece. They are thinking The wider patriotism of the nation the Greeks openly or in their hearts ranked in the second place. Look again at the speech of the Athenians. First came Athens and her gods and heroes—their fathers’ gods; next To Hellenikon, that whereby they are not merely Athenians but Hellenes—community of race and speech, the common interest in the national gods and their festivals, such as Zeus of Olympia with the Olympian Games, the Delphian Apollo with the Pythian Games. Of course this Hellenic or Panhellenic interest was always there, and in a sense the future lay with it; but never in the times when Greece was at its greatest did it supplant the old intense local loyalties. The movement of Greek civilization is from the narrower to the larger conception of patriotism, but the latter ideal is grounded in the former. Greek love of country was fed from local fires, and even Greek cosmopolitanism left one a citizen, albeit a citizen of the world. So it was with Eleutheria, which enlarged itself in the same sense and with an equal pace. This development can be studied best in Athens, which was “the Hellas of Hellas.” One finds in Attic literature a passionate Hellenism combined with a passionate conviction that Hellenism finds its best representative in Athens. The old local patriotism survives, but is nourished more and more with new ambitions. New claims, new ideals are advanced. One claim appears very early, if we may believe Herodotus that the Athenians used it in debate with the men of Tegea before the Battle There is a play of Euripides, called The Suppliant Women, which deals with the episode of the unburied dead at Thebes. The fragmentary Argument says: The scene is Eleusis. Chorus of Argive women, mothers of the champions who have fallen at Thebes. The drama is a glorification of Athens. The eloquent Adrastos, king of Argos, pleads the cause of the suppliant women who have come to Athens to beg the aid of its young king Theseus in procuring the burial of their dead. Theseus is at first disposed to reject their prayer, for reasons of State; he must consider the safety of his own people; when his mother Aithra breaks out indignantly: Surely it will be said that with unvalorous hands, when thou mightest have won a crown of glory for thy city, thou didst decline the peril and match thyself, ignoble labour, with a savage swine; and when it was thy part to look to helm and spear, putting forth thy might therein, wast proven a coward. To think that son of mine—ah, do not so! Seest thou how Athens, whom mocking lips have named unwise, flashes back upon her scorners “To make the world safe for democracy” is something; but Athens never found it safe, perhaps did not believe it could be safe. Ready to take risks, facing danger with a lifting of the heart ... their whole life a round of toils and dangers ... born neither themselves to rest nor to let other people. In such phrases are the Athenians described by their enemies. A friend has said: I must publish an opinion which will be displeasing to most; yet (since I think it to be true) I will not withhold it. If the Athenians in fear of the coming peril had left their land, or not leaving it but staying behind had yielded themselves to Xerxes, none would have tried to meet the King at sea. And so all would have been lost. But as the matter fell out, it would be the simple truth to say that the Athenians were the saviours of Greece. The balance of success was certain to turn to the side they espoused, and by choosing the cause of Hellas and the preservation of her freedom it was the Athenians and no other that roused the whole Greek world—save those who played the traitor—and under God thrust back the King. And some generations later, Demosthenes, in what might be called the funeral oration of Eleutheria, sums up the claim of Athens in words whose undying splendour is all pride and glory transfiguring the pain of failure and defeat. Let no man, I beseech you, imagine that there is anything Demosthenes was right in thinking that Eleutheria was most at home in Athens. Now Athens, as all men know, was a “democracy”; that is, the general body of the citizens (excluding the slaves and “resident aliens”) personally made and interpreted their laws. Such a constitution was characterized by two elements which between them practically exhausted its meaning; namely, autonomy or freedom to govern oneself by one’s own laws, and isonomy or equality of all citizens before the law. Thus Eleutheria, defined as the Reign of Law, may be regarded as synonymous with Democracy. “The basis of the democratical constitution is Eleutheria,” says Aristotle. This is common ground with all Greek writers, whether they write to praise or to condemn. Thus Plato humorously, but not quite The naÏvetÉ of this provokes a smile, but it should provoke some reflection too. Why does the rhetoric of liberty move us so little? Partly, I think, because the meaning of the word has changed, and partly because of this new “liberty” we have a super-abundance. No longer does Liberty mean in the first place the Reign of Law, but something like its opposite. Let us recover the Greek attitude, and we recapture, or at least understand, the Greek emotion concerning Eleutheria. Jason says to Medea in Euripides’ play, Thou dwellest in a Greek instead of a Barbarian land, and hast come to know Justice and the use of Law without favour to the strong. The most “romantic” hero in Greek legend recommending the conventions! This, however, is admirably and characteristically Greek. The typical heroes of ancient story are alike in their championship of law and order. I suppose the two most popular and representative were Heracles and Theseus. Each goes up and down Greece and Barbary destroying hybristai, local robber-kings, strong savages, devouring monsters, ill customs and every manner of “lawlessness” and “injustice.” In their place each introduces Greek manners and government, Law and Justice. It was this which so attracted Greek sympathy to them and so excited the Greek imagination. For Such a view was natural for them. Whether it shall seem natural to us depends on the fortunes of our civilization. On that subject we may leave the prophets to rave, and content ourselves with the observation that there are parts of Europe to-day in which many a man must feel himself in the position of Roland fighting the Saracens or AËtius against the Huns. As for ourselves, however confident we may feel, we shall be foolish to be over-confident; for we are fighting a battle that has no end. The Barbarian we shall have always with us, on our frontiers or in our own breasts. There is also the danger that the prize of victory may, like Angelica, escape the strivers’ hands. Already perhaps the vision which inspires us is changing. I am not concerned to attack the character of that change but to interpret the Greek conception of civilization, merely as a contribution to the problem. To the Greeks, then, civilization is The Greek conception, therefore, seems to work. I think it works, and worked, because the tradition, so cherished as it is, is not regarded as stationary. It is no more stationary to the Greeks than a tree, and a tree whose growth they stimulated in every way. It seems a fairly common error, into which Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton sometimes fall, for modern champions of tradition to over-emphasize its stability. There has always been the type of “vinous, loudly singing, unsanitary men,” which Mr. Wells has called the ideal of these two writers; he is the foundational type of European civilization. But it almost looks as if Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton were entirely satisfied with him. They want him to stay on his small holding, and eat quantities of ham and cheese, and drink quarts of ale, and hate rich men and politicians, and be perfectly parochial and illiterate. But Hellenism means, simply an effort to work on this sound and solid stuff; it is not content to leave him as he is; it strives to develope him, but to develope him within |
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