Greek Lands and Letters

Epaminondas told the Bœotians that their country was the stage of Ares, and several battles fought on their soil were of national significance. At Leuctra Epaminondas defeated Sparta. At Tanagra Athenians and Spartans first tried their strength against each other. At Delium the Athenians were defeated by the Bœotians in a struggle in which Alcibiades and Socrates took part. Alcibiades, who saved his master’s life, afterwards told their friends that in the retreat Socrates behaved exactly as he did in the streets of Athens, “turning his eyes observantly from side to side, though drenched with rain, and calmly looking about on friend and foe.” Above all, at Chæronea and Platæa occurred momentous events.

Late in September of the year 479 B. C., one hundred and forty-one years before Greek liberty was surrendered at Chæronea, there was fought near Platæa, in the plain between Cithæron and the Asopus, the last of the battles “wherein the Medes of the crooked bows were overthrown.” The work begun at Marathon was here completed. “The rest of the army died in Bœotia” was an Æschylean line calculated to arouse an Athenian audience. And an exquisite Herodotean story was fostered if not created by the desire of the Greeks to believe that the Persians had a foreboding of their disaster. Herodotus had the story from Thersander of Orchomenus. A Theban gave a dinner to Mardonius and fifty Persian nobles. The Persian who shared Thersander’s couch said to him:—

“‘Since here at table thou hast shared my food and my libation, I would leave with thee a memorial of my judgment that thou too, informed beforehand, mayest know how to plan for thy advantage. Dost see these Persians feasting here, and that host which we left encamping by the river? Of all these within brief space of time thou wilt behold a few survivors only.’ And as the Persian spoke these words he let fall many tears. Whereat Thersander, struck with wonder at his speech, replied: ‘Well, then, ’t were fitting to say this to Mardonius and to those next after him in honour.’ To that the other said: ‘My friend, what needs must happen by the will of God it is not possible for man to turn aside, and then, too, none is wont to yield to warnings, however credible, and many of us Persians, although our eyes are opened, follow on, constrained by necessity. This pang is bitterest of all, for men to know much and to have power over naught.’”

The battle of Platæa occurred because Mardonius, the general of Xerxes, undertook to oppose the Spartan Pausanias, commander of the Greek allies, as he was making his way from the south, over the passes of Cithæron, to attack disloyal Thebes. The Platæans, true to the patriotism they had displayed at Marathon and Artemisium, joined the Greeks. The battle lasted for some days and was, as usual, retarded and complicated by the inability of the Greeks to coöperate; but it ended in the defeat and death of Mardonius, the capture of the luxurious Persian camp, and the final discouragement of the Orient. Herodotus’s account of the battle not only contains strategic details but is full of episodes which, even if they are but traditional or the creations of his own audacious vivacity, illustrate the truth that the conflict was one of civilizations and of ideals. The Persian cavalry leader, Macistius, glows in scarlet and gold, and when he is killed his men fill all Bœotia with the clamour of their grief. The Greek officers show his naked body to their soldiers because it is “worth seeing for its stature and beauty.” Mardonius gallops in on his snow-white charger where the fight is hottest and leads to death the picked guard of one thousand men, the flower of the Persian army. A Spartan kills him, but Pausanias refuses to maltreat his dead body even though the Persians had crucified the body of the Spartan Leonidas at Thermopylæ. In the camp of Mardonius are found a silver throne, a brass manger for the horses, and countless utensils of Oriental luxury. Pausanias orders served on the same spot a Spartan supper.

Modern historians have complained that Herodotus perpetuated and “consecrated” the illusion of the Athenians that they played a worthy part in the battle, while in reality they were but half-hearted and the battle was won by the “discipline and prowess of the Spartan hoplites.” Herodotus did, however, admit that though the Athenians fought well the Lacedæmonians fought better, and when, with characteristic Greek emphasis on individuals, he discussed which single men were most courageous, he assigned the first four places to Spartans.

In any case the Spartans did not fail to receive full credit for the victory from their contemporaries. Pindar called Platæa the glory of the Lacedæmonians as Salamis was the glory of the Athenians. And Æschylus, even within the Dionysiac theatre, attributed the Persian defeat to the “Dorian spear.” Perhaps no one regretted that both the Athenian and Spartan dead who were buried on the battlefield were honoured in epitaphs by Simonides. For the Athenians he wrote with dignity:—

But the Spartans inspired his finer eloquence:—

When Platæa next appears in a great passage of literature she is shorn of her glory, the helpless prey of a foreign enemy and a hostile neighbour. During the Peloponnesian War, in 431 B. C., the Spartans conquered the city and, to please the Thebans, razed it to the ground. Thucydides’s account of the tragic occurrence includes the speeches made to the Spartans by the Platæans, who prayed for their lives, and by the Thebans, who urged their murder. That no speeches in Thucydides are more dramatic has been generally conceded from the time of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. They have made it bitter even now to remember that the selfish opportunism and merciless rancour of the Thebans prevailed against the memories of “the great days of old,” invoked by the Platæans: “Look yonder to the sepulchres of your fathers slain by the Medes and buried in this land. Them we have honoured year by year with public offerings of raiment and such other things as usage calls for.... Pausanias gave them burial here because he felt that he was placing them with friends and in a friendly land. But you, if you shall slay us and shall make Platæa Theban land, what do you else in this than leave your fathers and your kinsmen, bereft of honours that are theirs, among murderers and in a hostile land? Nay more, you will actually enslave a country in which the Hellenes won their liberty and bring to desolation sanctuaries of the gods in which they prayed before they gained mastery over the Medes.”

The desolation fell. Later the little town was rebuilt, destroyed once more, and finally restored, though somewhat meanly, in the time of Alexander. Now not even a modern village brings life to the ancient site. Only ruins of the Alexandrian walls remain.

Bœotia had several important religious centres outside of Thebes. More penetrating than the trumpet of war were the voices that called the Greeks of north and south, and even the barbarians of the east, to the sanctuary of oracular Apollo on the slopes of Mount Ptoön, or to the oracle of Trophonius (a local deity probably to be identified with Zeus) at Lebadeia, which is beautifully situated on the western side of the Copaic plain looking toward Helicon and Parnassus. The Ptoön precinct was already abandoned in Plutarch’s time, and even more deserted than it is to-day when archæologists outnumber the occasional shepherds in search of mountain pasture. But the oracle of Lebadeia retained its sanctity into Roman times and was consulted by both Plutarch and Pausanias. In our day the same river in which the suppliants used to bathe, in preparation for the difficult sacred rites, turns the mills and factories of one of the busiest industrial centres of northern Greece.

Religion in Bœotia, as everywhere in Greece, furnished an artistic impulse. Contests of poetry and music were held at almost every centre. Architecture, sculpture, and painting were represented by the most famous masters. A temple renowned for its beauty was that of the Graces at Orchomenus. Within it, on a happy day in the fifth century, a chorus of boys lustily sang an ode written by Pindar for one of their fellows who had won a foot-race in Pisa’s famous valley. The young champion had doubtless illustrated the influence of his native divinities whom the poet celebrates:—

To moderns the most familiar of all the shrines of Bœotia is that of the Muses on Mount Helicon. So familiar, indeed, has it become through tradition and poetry that its geographical position is as unimportant as that of Raphael’s Parnassus. It almost perplexes us to localize Helicon as the eastern peak, now called Zagora, of the southern portion of the group of mountains that lie between the Copaic plain and the Gulf of Corinth; and to know that at the northern foot of this peak still nestles the valley, green and shady and traversed by a mountain stream, where once foregathered the iris-haired, golden-snooded Muses. Hippocrene even, struck out by the hoof of Pegasus as he flew toward heaven, is identified with the modern Kryopegadi, a very cold and clear perennial spring high up on the eastern side of the mountain within a little green glade encircled by fir trees. Helicon is still the home of fir-woods, oak groves and strawberry shrubs. Pausanias said that nowhere else could the goats find sweeter berries, and nowhere else could be found so many healing herbs. Hellebore, the ancient cure for madness, grew here in abundance.

In spite of the almost incalculable importance of the worship of the Muses and their pervasive presence in poetry, Greek literature scarcely concerns itself with their localized abode. Sophocles breaks the strain of the “Œdipus Tyrannus” by a fleeting vision of the nymphs sporting with Dionysus on the far-off heights of Helicon. And Hesiod was inspired to write his “Theogony” by a vision of the Muses that came to him as he slept on the mountain “majestical, sacred:”—

For the most part it is only in Alexandrian poetry, from which Roman poetry derived a large part of the material which it passed on to modern poetry, that we find Helicon and Hippocrene figuratively used as sources of inspiration.

Certain Bœotian towns illustrate other traditions of culture. Thespiæ, in the territory of Platæa, was used by Cicero to illustrate what was so little understood and so greatly scorned by the Romans—the Greek love of art. Nothing could so embitter the conquered people of Greece as to take from them or pretend to buy from them their works of art. “Believe me,” Cicero urges, “no community in the whole of Greece or Asia ever sold of its own accord to anybody any statue or picture or civic ornament. For the Greeks take marvellous delight in things which we despise. What would the Thespians take for their Eros, the only thing that attracts visitors to their town?” This was the Praxitelean statue which the sculptor himself ranked with his Faun as his best work and which Phryne obtained from him and presented to her native city. Eros was the tutelar divinity of the place, originally worshipped in the form of an unwrought stone. The statue, called forth by the æsthetic taste of a later age and passionately appreciated by the people, was taken to Rome by Caligula, returned by Claudius, stolen again by Nero. Pausanias saw only a copy when he was at Thespiæ. Now no copy like the familiar Capitoline copy of the Faun supplies us with half knowledge. But a visible symbol of Thespiæ’s other claim to remembrance has been left to us, to enrich the fragmentary wall and the few foundations that alone at present mark the ancient site. Not only did the city share in the victory of Platæa, but more daringly in earlier years, when the struggle with Persia was on the “razor’s edge” of uncertainty, she had sent her strongest men to die with Leonidas at Thermopylæ. The fragments of a stone lion similar to the lion of Chæronea are thought to mark the grave of these sons of Thespiæ who were inspired by—

In the eastern valley of the Asopus, or Vourieni, lie the not inconsiderable remains of ancient Tanagra, a city more popularly known to-day for its artistic taste than any other Greek city, except Athens. As early as 1874 excavations of its necropolis began to yield in extraordinary abundance the small terra-cotta figures which now adorn many museums, and in copies, more or less successful, have become a staple article of modern trade. These figurines, rough in finish but scrupulously lovely in shape, were objects of familiar use to the Tanagrians, being thrown into graves at burials. Other things in the city implied more civic pride. Pausanias mentions approvingly the unusually good taste of the inhabitants in separating their religious buildings from the business and residence portions of the city. And Dicæarchus is enthusiastic over their fine houses, adorned with porticoes and encaustic paintings. Literature also had its place, for here lived Corinna, a woman of no mean poetic talent. Pausanias saw her tomb in an honoured place in the city and a picture of her in the Gymnasium binding on her head a fillet to celebrate a victory over Pindar at Thebes. With unexpected acumen he remarks that she probably owed her victory partly to the fact that she wrote in a dialect intelligible to the Bœotians, and partly to her beauty. Moderns know her through the story that she advised Pindar to use mythological allusions, and after his first experiment told him that she had meant him to sow with the hand, not with a sack; and through her own haunting fragment of song: “Among the white-armed women of Tanagra, a city made famous by sweet soprano voices.” Such evidences of culture are the more surprising when we learn from Dicæarchus that Tanagra was a town of farmers. Their bluff straightforwardness, their kindliness and their simple living greatly impressed him in comparison with the insolence and dissipation of the Thebans.

Dicæarchus describes also with a few graphic words the inhabitants of Anthedon, a fishing town on the Gulf of Eubœa: “They are almost all fishermen, earning their livelihood by their hooks, by the purple shell, and by sponges. They grow old on the beach, among the seaweed and in their huts. They are all men of ruddy countenance and spare figure; their nails are worn away by reason of working constantly in the sea.”^[32] This town,—still lovely, it is said, when the sunset illumines the lilac hills of Eubœa and rose-colour clouds float above the little fishing-boats in the bay,—furnished to literature an important character in Glaucus, a fisherman who, by eating a certain grass, became a sea-god with the gift of prophecy. Many tales were told of him from time to time, especially by seafaring men. Æschylus wrote two plays, not now extant, with him as the central figure, and thence the subject passed into the poetic storehouse of the Alexandrian playwrights. Plato made use of the legend in one of his noblest presentations of idealism. The soul marred by its association with the body and with the evils of human life is like the old sea-god, overgrown with shellfish and seaweed, wounded and broken by the action of the waves. But if the soul would always love wisdom and pursue the divine, it would be lifted out of the sea in which it now is and be forever disencumbered of its rocky covering.

South of Anthedon, on the strait of Euripus, lies Aulis, of stately memory. To us as to Odysseus it is, as it were, but “yesterday or the day before” that the Achæan ships were gathering in Aulis freighted with trouble for Priam and the Trojans, and hecatombs were being offered on the altars beneath a beautiful plane tree by a stream of bright water. Here too Iphigeneia was sacrificed at the altar of Artemis. The story is told by Euripides, in the “Iphigeneia in Aulis,” in a way to bring out the latent heroism of the young. Iphigeneia grieves to leave the sunlight and clings to her mother, but in the end with splendid daring offers herself a willing sacrifice: “Mother, hear my words,” she cries,—

In the lyric recital of Æschylus she is pathetically the victim:—

Pausanias saw the temple of Artemis, and within it as a revered relic a piece of the wood from the Homeric plane tree. The spring was also pointed out to him, and on a neighbouring hill the threshold of Agamemnon’s hut. Those were happy days for sight-seers. To-day a traveller can find only a few remains of the temple, near the ruined chapel of St. Nicholas, a little distance up the valley which stretches inland from the shore. But he may stand on the beach and watch tides as strange and irregular as they were when Æschylus described the Achæan host, troubled and held fast—

The heart of Bœotia’s literature lies in the Hesiodic poetry. Hesiod has a dual personality. As a half mythical “titulary president” of a school of poetry localized near Mount Helicon and rivalling the epic school, in Asia Minor and the islands, whose eponymous hero was Homer; as traditional author of the “Theogony,” which was the manual of mythology for the Greeks, ranking in educational value almost with the Iliad and Odyssey, and of the “Works and Days,” which was a collection of widely accepted ethical maxims, he seems to lose his home in Bœotia and to belong like Homer to the whole of Greece. But unlike Homer he is universally believed to have existed, and to have written a definite body of poetry which only later came to include many additions by unknown hands. We may, then, for our purposes, justly consider him as an individual with local habitation and a name. His family, either before his birth or while he was a child, immigrated from an Æolian colony in Asia Minor to Æolian Bœotia. They were farmers and lived in the little town of Ascra, which was perched on a conical hill opposite the larger mass of Helicon, to the north of the entrance to the valley of the Muses. It was destroyed by Thespiæ, and was deserted in Pausanias’s time. But “the tower” was standing which is still a conspicuous landmark and gives to the entire hill the name of Pyrgaki. Modern travellers are attracted by the wide and beautiful view which the hill commands.

Ascra itself, in Hesiod’s peevish opinion, was a miserable village, bad in winter, abominable in summer, good at no time. He could, however, when a boy, tend his sheep on the slopes of Helicon and see the Muses in his dreams. At some time he had a lawsuit with his brother about his inheritance, and became embittered by disappointment. This and the difficulties of his life as a husbandman led him to see the world in the hard colours of uncorrected realism. Only a few enthusiasts pretend to find in his “Works and Days” the beauty of the “Georgics,” in which Virgil was his avowed imitator. The Roman poet combined with a delicate temperament the education of his age, and tried to show to his countrymen, the already weary masters of the world, the victims of an over-luxurious civilization, that in farming lay a potent charm and a remedial grace. But Hesiod lived in the eighth century B. C. and farmed for his living. To us, grown more democratic than the later Greeks and Romans, his chief appeal is that of the “mouthpiece of obscure handworkers in the earliest centuries of Greek history, the poet of their daily labours, sufferings and wrongs, the singer of their doubts and infantine reflections on the world in which they had to toil.”

As agricultural life is concerned with certain permanent factors in human experience and is also proverbially conservative, Hesiod’s picture of it is probably true, in its broad outlines, of after centuries and of many another place than Bœotia. Later Greek writers were not attracted by the homely subject, and the “Works and Days” is the sole specimen in Greece of a kind of literature which is practically born out of the soil and out of nature’s varied processes.

In this didactic poem we are introduced to a community whose work and pleasures were governed by the seasons. The white blossoms of the spring, the swallow lifting her wing at dawn, the song of the cuckoo, the tender green of the fig tree, the early rains, all meant the planting and nursing of the seeds. The summer heat that brought the cicada’s shrill cry brought, too, a little leisure for picnicking in the shade of a rock by a stream, off creamy cake and goat’s milk and wine. But in the cooler hours the corn had to be threshed on the stone floors, and the hay stored in the barns. In the autumn the falling leaves and the crane’s migratory call showed that wood must be cut, ploughshares made, the proper servants and steers procured, and the grapes gathered and pressed. In the winter the industrious man had to look after his household store, much as he was tempted to linger by the forge and saunter in the warm porticoes. For in January the whirlwind of the north often swept down from Thrace, the Earth howled and long and loud the forests roared. The oaks and pines were hurled from hilltops. The beasts of the wild wood crept low to escape the drifting snow, the oxen and goats cowered in their stalls. Only the young daughter in her pretty chamber under her mother’s roof was safe. The farmer had to put on thicker underclothing and a woollen coat and oxhide shoes lined with thick socks, and pull his cap down over his ears as he hurried home at nightfall. Thus intertwined in Hesiod’s Bœotian mind were poetry and prudence. And prudence predominated in his catalogue of the lucky and unlucky days which next to the seasons regulated the farmer’s life. From sheep-shearing to marriage everything must have its proper day. This was true also of seafaring life, for which Hesiod gives rather grudging directions. Sailors and fishermen, potters and smiths mingled in friendly intercourse with the husbandmen. Beggars and vagrants came and went. And news of the distant world and a kindling of dull fancy came with the wandering minstrels. Standards in such a world were simple. Men ate asphodel and mallows and had a creed as pleasing and as natural: to work hard and save a little every year, to be hospitable and neighbourly, to be good to one’s parents and faithful to one’s wife, never to abuse a trust and to sacrifice to the gods with clean hands and a pure heart.

Hesiod has little to say of holidays, but as Bœotia grew older celebrations of all kinds seem to have flourished conspicuously, even for Greece, which took so kindly to the bright colours, lively crowds, and stately processions of feast days. Many of these, occurring quadrennially, attracted delegates and visitors from other states, even from contemptuous Athens. Such were the Musæa, the great national contests in poetry and music on Mount Helicon in the valley of the Muses; the games and literary competitions at Apollo’s sanctuary on Mount Ptoön; and the Eleutheria, the Games of Freedom, at Platæa. More local festivals, also, like the athletic and musical contests at Thespiæ known as the Games of Love, and the Royal Games at Lebadeia in honour of King Zeus, often drew crowds of visitors. But many of us, could we have known ancient Bœotia, would have chosen homelier occasions for our visits. We would have sought out Tanagra on the feast day of Hermes, the Ram-bearer, when the handsomest boy of the town, in memory of a similar service rendered by Hermes at the time of a plague, bore a lamb on his shoulders about the city walls. And in the autumn at Platæa we would have attended the annual memorial service for those who died in the great battle. At daybreak myrrh and garlands were carried to the tombs, young boys chosen for their free birth bore jars of oil and precious ointment and of wine and milk, and the chief magistrate put on a purple robe and poured out a libation, saying, “I drink to those who lost their lives for the liberty of Greece.” Or at the sanctuary of Demeter at Mycalessus we would have watched the people from the surrounding farms lay at the feet of her image all kinds of autumn fruits, which they knew would keep fresh the whole year through.

This festival of Thanksgiving was doubtless of very ancient origin, as was also the spring festival of the Little Dædala, celebrated every few years in many Bœotian communities. The peasants and townspeople poured into the woods and chose, from certain signs, an oak tree out of which they made an image; and this image they set up and worshipped to the accompaniment of festal merriment. The custom originated in Platæa, if we may judge from the story believed by the common people. Hera, in a not unwonted fit of temper, had withdrawn to Eubœa, and Zeus could not persuade her to come back. But old Cithæron, lord of Platæa, advised him to play on her jealousy by dressing up a wooden image and telling her that he was going to marry Platæa, the wife of Asopus. Hera flew back, and in memory of the divine reunion the “Little Dædala” was instituted.

Every sixty years all Bœotia, its big and little cities, its farmsteads and fishing towns, united in the Great Dædala. The crowds gathered at Platæa. Long processions, representing each town, bore their own wooden images to the summit of Cithæron, seeking a narrow plateau where the snows had melted. Here altars were built and victims burned. And at night the great flames rose into the sky and were seen from afar, so that the young men in Attica and beyond the Gulfs doubtless said to each other, “Bœotia is celebrating as our fathers said,” and the old men shook their heads and remembered brighter fires.

Zeus and Hera have been long forgotten, nor are the feet of Dionysus heard upon the mountain, but still winter gives way to spring and the heart of man is glad. The hard-working people of modern Bœotia keep holiday when spring blooms anew, and Mount Cithæron gives them as of old the soft green of its budding oak leaves, the vivacious laughter of its loosened waters.