“Know that our city has the greatest name amongst all men because she never yields to her misfortunes. And even should we ever be compelled to yield a little—for it is nature’s way that all things bloom to suffer loss—there will abide a memory that we made our dwelling-place to be a city dowered with all things, and the mightiest of all.”

After the battles of Salamis and Platæa the Athenians brought back their families to Attica. Athens was a scene of desolation: the walls destroyed, the dwelling-houses ruined heaps, the sanctuaries burnt, the statues and other dedicatory offerings broken or carried off by the Persians. But the invaders had not carried off Athena Nike. Æschylus puts his own triumphant feeling into the mouth of the Persian messenger who brings the news of the defeat of Xerxes to Queen Atossa:—

Euripides, also, reëchoes this word of Æschylus and denies the sack of Athens. As a matter of fact little remained save a few houses used as Persian headquarters. But the blackened walls of the old temple on the Acropolis still stood in grim protest against the violation of the Virgin’s home and as an appeal to the citizens to provide her with a fairer abode. The appeal was not disregarded. In the fifth century the city was extended and the Acropolis was adorned with monuments of sculpture and architecture. The gods and the public needs came first. Private dwellings in the fifth century were not imposing. The old Marathon fighters and their immediate descendants were content with private simplicity. In the fourth century, however, private luxury came uppermost. Demosthenes contrasts the unequalled splendour of the temples, statues and public buildings of the old time with the moderation in private life, which, he says, was so marked “that if any of you perchance knows what sort of a house was the dwelling of Aristides or Miltiades or any of those then eminent, he sees that it was no whit more stately than those next door—while to-day upstarts have built themselves private houses more stately than the public buildings.”

Systematically to discuss the fifth and fourth century references to specific sites—buildings public and private, stoas, temples, theatres, gymnasia, music-halls, courtrooms, sanctuaries and statues, walls and gates, the place of the Assembly, the market-place and the markets, fountains, streets, and wards, would require several volumes. And although it is possible to present by inference a reasonably clear picture of the environment and daily life of the citizens, yet the exact identification of the majority of the sites in the remains existing to-day is either impossible or a matter of conjecture. Apart from the Acropolis buildings but few conspicuous ruins or memorials of these two great centuries are left for actual inspection. The continuous occupation of Athens by successive generations of changing masters has obliterated or buried (perhaps for future identification) the greater part of the city that lay around the base of the Acropolis. It is only surprising that so much remains. It is not meagre except in comparison with what has disappeared.

Around or over all that is left of Classic, Hellenistic, or Roman Athens is the modern city, effacing itself in patches at the behest of the archæologist, or developing slowly in accordance with its own needs.

In this chapter, however, we have to do directly only with the Athens of the fifth or fourth centuries. If the physical remains from this period are fragmentary, the literature, although itself but fragments of the whole, is the great bulk of existing classic Greek literature outside of the epic, the earlier philosophers, and the lyric. And this corpus of literature was in large part native Attic. At the same time the talent from without gravitated also to Athens. Herodotus from the Dorian Halicarnassus not only wrote in Ionic, but adopted the Athenian attitude so largely as to vitiate in part his value as an independent historian. Hippocrates, the great Ionian physician, visited Athens. The Sophists, though coming from the North, the West, or the islands, found in Athens the appropriate environment for a “circuit” faculty of an unarticulated federal university. Prose, seasoned and adorned, became henceforth an asset of the Athenian intellect and was made ready for the use of historian, orator, and philosopher. Athens, mistress of the seas, and herself producer of art and literature, needed no protective tariff against intellectual imports.

This very wealth of fifth and fourth century literature imposes limitations, more rigid than our uncertainty about this, that, or the other site, upon the effort to interpret the external Athens from the more enduring monuments of her thinkers. Nor is it true that the nexus between Athens and her literature may be made clear only by definite localization. We do not wish the conditions reversed. Although, for example, the courtrooms and the Lyceum have disappeared, we may, as we wander about Athens to-day, come much nearer the Greeks of the classic age than if, while the buildings had remained intact, the words of the orators and of the great Peripatetic could no longer reach our ears. The so-called “Theseum,” largely perfect as it is and invaluable for architectural and artistic suggestion, leaves us cold in the lack of literary association as compared with the Propylæa where many an old-time Athenian rubs elbows with us as we pass in and out between its stately columns. But in a wider sense we may “localize,” here on this Attic plain around the Acropolis and here under this Attic sky, the poetry and prose of the fifth and fourth centuries.

A brief summary of this poetry and prose will perhaps suggest more clearly the larger pattern from which, almost arbitrarily, selections may be made.

In the fifth century, lyric was brought to its perfection by singers not of Athens. But Ceos, the birthplace of two of them, was moored close to Attica. Simonides, the poet-laureate of the Persian wars, was much in Athens, and his nephew Bacchylides took the Attic Theseus for the theme of two of his extant poems, wrote one of his epinician odes in honour of an Athenian victor, and composed another poem expressly in laudation of Athens. Pindar himself studied in Athens, and afterwards, to his own townspeople’s disgust, praised her in no grudging terms. The Athenian drama itself, in the chorals of tragedy and of Aristophanes, contributed much of the greatest lyric extant in Greek literature.

Tragedy in the fifth century grew from infancy to maturity at Athens. When Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had completed their work it had received its final form for the Greeks, and was so transmitted to the great actors and the lesser playwrights of the fourth century.

Comedy likewise culminated with Aristophanes in the fifth century. More flexible than tragedy, however, it could humour successfully the changing moods of the body politic and retain its vigour through the whole of the fourth century. Even under Macedon, Menander in the New Comedy could recast much that Euripides had tried, with varying success, to embody within the canonized limits of orthodox tragedy.

History was the gift of the fifth century. Herodotus after the Persian wars bridged with his epic prose the Ægean, and we reach terra firma in Thucydides’s history in the latter part of the century. In the first part of the fourth century we have Xenophon, the historian, biographer, essay-writer, and historical novelist. These were precursors of a line of historians appearing sporadically even down through Byzantine times.

Oratory, an inalienable inheritance of the Hellene even before Athena coached the crafty Odysseus, received at Athens a certain finality of form, or forms, that has imposed its influence upon the occidental, whether Roman or Englishman, lawyer or epideictic speaker. The unwritten word of statesmen like Pericles, fusing the persuasion of the politician with the keener rationalism of Anaxagoras and the raucous, but not wholly unpatriotic, opportunism of demagogues like Cleon or Hyperbolus, was paired with the more decently draped pragmatism of the Sophists, and resulted in the selected group of the “ten” orators, of the fifth and fourth centuries. There was the somewhat archaic Antiphon, the dignified criminal lawyer; Andocides, who brought his rough and ready style to bear upon burning questions of contemporary politics; Lysias, the son of an alien, but truly Attic, the younger friend of Socrates, the lucid narrator, the relentless prosecutor; Isæus, the capable testamentary barrister; Isocrates, who both saw the building of the Erechtheum and outlived the battle of Chæronea, and whose over-finished oratory transmitted the florid adornment of Gorgias to the schools in which Cicero was trained; Demosthenes, greatest of all, whether in private suits or in his arraignment of public foes, whose terrorizing cleverness was quick to strike or counter like the flashing arms of the athlete impeded with no ounce of florid superfluity; Æschines, his great antagonist; Lycurgus; Hyperides; and Dinarchus.

Philosophy as a native Attic product matured last of all. Ionia had produced the great “physical” philosophers, and Pythagoras had gone in the sixth century to Italy; but in the first half of the fifth century the so-called “colonial” philosophers, like the foreign Sophists, influenced Athenian thought—some of them by personal visits. They came from the East and from the West. Parmenides came from Italy, and his influence was felt by Socrates and transmitted to Plato and Aristotle. The aristocratic Empedocles came on a visit from Sicily. Anaxagoras from Ionia settled at Athens in his youth. His “chaos-controlling mind”—the primal force of reason—impregnated the statesmanship of Pericles and engendered the rationalism of Euripides. The Athenians might banish the philosopher, but his “primal force of reason” was already busy in rearranging the chaos of traditional beliefs. It emerges clearly in Plato as intelligent Mind. Socrates, though not himself a writer, is the central figure of philosophic literature. Pre-Socratic thought focussed in him as in a burning-glass. From him shoot out the divergent rays of the Academics and Peripatetics, the Cynics and the precursors of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics. No one of his disciples reproduced his views with any exactness, but he stimulated self-examination and independent thought. Each took from him what he could or would, and developed differing or mutually exclusive schools. Like the rivers of Greece, coursing for a time through the underground “katavothras,” pre-Socratic speculative thought on physics and metaphysics flowed on beneath the open devotion of Socrates to ethical questions, and reappears in his successors.

Plato in the fourth century constituted himself the ethical and philosophic executor of Socrates. Loyalty and a wide vision alike combined to perpetuate his master’s name in the intellectual output of the great Platonic dialogues. It has been the work of centuries to disentangle the real views of this sleeping partner from those of Plato’s own constructive intellect, which built, pulled down, and reared anew the dwelling-places for the minds of many men in many generations.

Aristotle, like Anaxagoras, came as an alien and settled in Athens in his youth. After the death of his master, Plato, he left Athens, travelled, and became the tutor of Alexander. After the accession of his royal pupil to the throne, he established at Athens in the Lyceum a rival school to the Academy.

Antisthenes, half Athenian, half Thracian, the faithful follower of Socrates, had before this established the Cynic school in another gymnasium, the Cynosarges, where the victors fresh from Marathon had encamped. Socrates, the barefoot friar, the new avatar of Heracles, was his patron saint. Later in the century Zeno the Stoic set up his eclectic school in the Painted Porch of the Agora, and Epicurus, of an Attic father though born at Samos, established his school in his own Gardens near the Dipylon.

Theophrastus, the friend of Epicurus and of Menander, gives us in his “Characters,” at the close of this period, vivid portraits of Athenian life which supplement the fragments of Menander and the other writers of the New Comedy, and also, as pupil and successor of Aristotle, carried on his master’s teachings in the Lyceum. Thus one pupil busied himself in transmitting through his intellectual heirs the esoteric thought of his master, while Alexander, another pupil, had constructed on lines that paralleled the intellectual imperialism of his teacher a material organon of Empire (utterly at variance with his master’s conception of the ideal state) that no successor could wield alone until Rome reached forth and grasped it in her iron hand.

But to understand at all the meaning of the literature, it is also necessary to remind ourselves of some of the more striking features of the history of these two centuries. They are crowded with conspicuous figures and with events significant to the philosophic student of political institutions.

In general the fifth century exhibits the rise and downfall of the imperialistic policy, the fourth century the rehabilitation of a chastened democracy, with sporadic echoes of a federalizing ideal. But no one policy can be predicated of the fifth century. It varied with the great leaders, Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, and others—the old in conflict with the new; conservative, aristocratic democracy against imperialism; democracy against oligarchy; ochlocracy against democracy. When the Persian peril was thrust back, the irrepressible conflict between Sparta and Athens emerged. The struggle for the hegemony between them, or between varying combinations of the Greek states, was to continue at intervals until the time when all the old powers of Greece were to succumb to Macedon.

Themistocles, the hero of Salamis, was ostracized from Athens within eight years of the great sea-fight, but his spirit still animated his countrymen, and his policies were afterwards revived or expanded. His rival Aristides guided affairs at home, and Cimon, the son of Miltiades, sailed with the conquering Athenian navy. His victory at Eurymedon in 468 B. C. made it possible to fortify Athens and Piræus and to merge the Confederacy of Delos in the Athenian Empire. In seven years more Cimon in turn was ostracized, but at the end of another seven years the rich treasure of Delos could be transferred to Athens and the empire formally established. It was to last until the disaster at Ægospotami, in 405 B. C. Pericles, after successfully competing with the reactionary patriotism of statesmen like Thucydides, obtained, at the ostracism of the latter in 442 B. C., the controlling power at Athens, which he guided by his regal persuasion for the next fifteen years. The imperialism of Pericles realized the policy of Themistocles on the seas, reaped the harvest of the great Cimon’s victories, and transmuted the treasure of Delos into the sinews of war and the monuments of the glorified Acropolis. He reshaped the civic life, even curtailing the sacred powers of the Areopagus, and by popular changes in the complexion of Council, Assembly, and Law Courts, prepared the way for the uneven rule of demagogues after his own strong hand should be withdrawn. He had great odds to contend with. After the renewal of the Peloponnesian wars in 431 B. C., with the succession of victories and reverses, the Great Plague came to assert an unlooked-for hegemony. On the suffering and disasters of the city followed the trial and condemnation of Pericles himself. He was indeed reinstated as indispensable, but his death in the following year left Athens at the mercy of the demagogues—with Alcibiades to follow. The Sicilian expedition, the crowning venture of imperialism, issued—as was to be expected with no real successor of Pericles to direct it—in the disaster of 413 B. C., when the brave Syracusans, with the willing help of Sparta, dissipated the Athenian dream of vast colonial expansion.

The next ten years was for Athens a losing struggle at home and abroad. The short-lived oligarchy of the Four Hundred in 411 B. C., the strenuous but vain efforts of Theramenes to reconcile oligarchy and democracy, the civic strife and war with the powerful Lysander, the crushing defeat at Ægospotami, the intervention of Sparta, the brief but terrible régime of the Thirty Tyrants, completed, in 404 B. C., the final overthrow of imperial Athens. But Sparta, with politic generosity, while doing away with the empire, left Athens free to establish a more stable democracy that was to last through the greater part of the fourth century. Oligarchy could no more find a hearing, and, although Hellenic federations were eloquently advocated by the orators and actually formed, despotic empire was no longer feasible for the Athenians. Their new leader, Conon, however, the foe of Sparta, could succeed after Lysander’s death in making Athens independent and strong. We come upon his work now and again in Athens and in Piræus, and in the renascent civic life the intellectual life went on with new vigour. The imperial dream finally came true, but from the outside. The Macedonian, though sneered at as barbarian by Demosthenes, confirmed at the Olympic games the validity of his Hellenic claim that he had asserted at Chæronea. The fitful struggle against the sway of Macedon only resulted, under a successor less philhellenic than Philip, in the forced suicide of the great Demosthenes and the execution of Hypereides, whose funeral oration, pronounced over the dead heroes of the “lost cause,” carries us beyond the great speech of Pericles—pronounced on a similar but less hopeless occasion—back to the heroes of Marathon and Salamis. Speaking of the dead leader Leosthenes, he says: “In the dark under-world—suffer us to ask—who are they that will stretch forth a right hand to the captain of our dead?... There, I deem, will be Miltiades and Themistocles, and those others who made Hellas free, to the credit of their city, to the glory of their names.”^[8]

We sit to-day beneath a Greek sky on the rising tiers of the modern centuries, and the drama of Athenian life is reproduced before our eyes. The greater protagonists of literature and life play out their rôles. Many another actor plays his less prominent but essential part. The “mutes” contribute. The chorus of democracy is seldom absent from the scene. The binoculars of modern historians penetrate behind paint and mask and robe, and the squalor of the real actor is at times laid bare. We may choose, however, to ignore minutiæ and to give ourselves up to the more satisfying perspective of the literature, and to let sweep before us the bright procession of form and colour, the song and saga, the Dionysiac revel and tragic mimicry that fill out the real drama of life.

Æschylus connects the old and the new Athens. Before Marathon he produced his first play; in the interval before Salamis he gained a first prize; and he brought out his greatest dramas in the time of the Renascence, of which he was a great part.

The bare hill of the Areopagus claims attention as we descend from the Propylæa. It rises as a physical barrier between the deserted site of the old city of Theseus and that of Classic or of Modern Athens. With the sanctity attaching to the time-honoured prerogatives of its venerable court it was also a moral barrier between the old and the new in the days when Pericles was reshaping the civic life. And Æschylus in his “Eumenides,” the third play of his great trilogy, strove as best he could to reconcile old traditions with the inevitable readjustment to the life of imperial Athens. He spoke with the authority of a Hebrew prophet. Whatever else was changed, blood-guiltiness must be judged. Only within the mysterious gloom of the cleft beneath the Areopagus could the dread and ancient Furies, spawn of Night, be transformed into willing coadjutors of the goddess of Wisdom.

The Furies in hot haste have pursued from Delphi Orestes, the mother-murderer. Confidently anticipating the verdict, they cry:—

The god Apollo himself appears for the defendant, and when the decision goes against the Furies by Athena’s casting vote in the Areopagus Court, their bitterness against the “new” gods shoots forth like the serpents uncoiling in their hair:—

Athena pacifies the Furies by promising them a local sanctuary and the reverence of the citizens for all time. The old order is reconciled with the new, and the Furies, now the Eumenides—the Propitious Ones—are escorted to their dwelling in the cleft of the Areopagus by Athena’s own attendants, boys, maidens, and matrons, with ceremonious honour equal to the Panathenaic procession:—

The great mass broken off from the east end of the Areopagus rock has partially blocked the cleft into which the chorus conducts home the Dread Goddesses. As the procession, chanting its hymn, sweeps around the shoulder of the hill, the faded picture of ancient Athens regains its outlines as if under some powerful reagent. Wine-press and fountain, precincts and temples, rise again from their ruins; the throbbing life of the eager citizens reappears. But the gaily-dressed people have hushed jest and carping under the sense of awe evoked by Æschylus. The Athenians were then, as St. Paul on this same Areopagus called them long afterwards, “very scrupulous,” and it was no unworthy superstition that made it imperative to harmonize the cruder conceptions of the immutable laws of Retribution with the new and expansive wisdom of Athena. Swinburne, with keen insight into the universal application of the great drama, brings the “shadows of our deeds” under wisdom’s searching but not unkindly light:—

The visitor who takes his stand to-day immediately in front of the south side of the Areopagus is completely sequestered from the modern city. Here the Acropolis and the Areopagus rock make practically a continuous barrier to the close-built streets that on the northern side come crowding up their slopes. He is encircled with hills, and this ancient quarter of the city of Theseus lies waste and silent around him. The ground is harrowed and scarred by the spade of the archæologist. Only the foundations of sanctuaries and fountains, houses and cisterns, may be distinguished.

The rock-chambers opposite, called by courtesy the “Prison of Socrates,” will, however, recall us to classic Athens. While waiting for the return of the mission-ship from Delos to bring the day of execution, Crito and the rest listened to Socrates’s demonstrations of immortality. Plato sent his reason out as far into the invisible as reason can go. In the “Phædo,” after his half-playful periegesis of the underworld, Socrates is made to say: “Whosoever seem to have excelled in holy living, these are they who are set free and released from these earthly places as from prisons and fare upward to that pure habitation and make their dwelling-place in yonder land.... Therefore we must do our utmost to gain in life a share in virtue and wisdom. For the prize is noble and the hope is great!” or, as he adds presently, “The risk is fair.” And Socrates, like Pindar before him, finds the crowning joy of a blessed immortality neither in the unlaborious sunlit life by night and day, nor in the ocean breezes, nor in the flowers of gold blooming on trees of splendour, but in the company of the great and noble dead with whom to live “’twere more of happiness than tongue can tell.”

On the Pnyx hill we may recall the Athenian Assembly, and may turn in fancy the voluminous pages of Congressional Records filled with patriotism and jealousy; we listen to Pericles and his persuasive schemes for imperial expansion; or to Socrates, president for the day, refusing, amidst the clamours of demos and demagogues, to put to vote the illegal proposition to condemn in a body the ten generals; or to Demosthenes pleading, denouncing, planning for the welfare of the city. Or in the half-light before dawn we may see the suffragettes of Aristophanes’s “Ecclesiazusæ” filing up the hill. More wily than their modern sisters, they have disguised themselves with beards and have dressed in the shoes and cloaks distrained from their husbands, imprisoned at home by naked necessity. With no man to oppose, the women quickly transfer the whole control of the State to themselves, and institute reforms that would put to shame the most radical of modern socialists. A slave, in the “Wasps” of Aristophanes, once had a dream by no means respectful to the Athenian legislature. Some sheep, with cloaks and staves, sat huddled together like just so many Athenians on the seats of the Pnyx, holding an Assembly. To-day the hill is left lonely, and the wandering goats, with their solemn faces and long beards, might renew the sittings unmolested.

In the face of the hill fronting towards the Acropolis, the rock-chamber of the Callirrhoë spring, with its sloping entrance and the parapet within, has been suggested as the original of the famous cave in Plato’s “Republic.” The Vari Cave, on the south side of Hymettus, might have made less of a strain, as has been urged, upon Plato’s imagination. However faint the resemblance of the Callirrhoë cave to Plato’s complex setting, it is enough to emphasize the vitality of this realistic figure, which has become typical, in modern poetry and prose, of the denizens of earth watching and naming the shadows thrown by the fire-light upon the cave’s wall, unable by reason of fetters to look around at the objects moving behind them, much less to rise and climb the long ascent to the brighter light above.

The innocent-looking ravine west of the Hill of the Nymphs is identified with the Barathrum. In antiquity its fame had penetrated to the underworld, where the innkeeper’s maid threatened to pitch the Pseudo-Heracles “into the Barathrum.” And Herodotus’s apocryphal story is at least ben trovato. He relates that, when the ambassadors of Darius came asking tokens of submission from the Greeks: “Some [the Athenians] took the messengers and threw them into the Barathrum, others [the Spartans] into a well, and bade them take earth and water from there to their King.” Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, if we are to believe the allusion in the “Gorgias,” barely escaped with a fine and banishment instead of the criminal’s end in this same pit.

If even the skeleton of the Athenian Market-place could be resurrected, like that of the Roman Forum, many scores of allusions would take on a local habitation. The Agora was the centre of life. In classic times it probably lay in the depression west of the “Theseum” hill, and extended, from the slopes of the Areopagus, northward about to the modern Hadrian street. Pindar, with no idle flattery, spoke of the “fair-famed Agora, in sacred Athens, inlaid with cunning workmanship.” Sculptor, painter, and architect gave of their best. The Prytaneum, close to, or in the Agora, was the city’s fireside. Distinguished foreigners and citizens here and in the Tholus enjoyed, temporarily or for life, the public hospitality. Socrates ironically suggests to his judges that the sentence really fitting his case would be: “Maintenance in the Prytaneum, much more so indeed than if any one of you has come off victor at Olympia with a race horse, a pair, or a four-horse team.” Plutarch relates that Aristides, far from enriching himself from the public purse, left not even enough for his funeral expenses, and that the Athenians “married off his daughters from the Prytaneum at the public cost—voting a dowry of three thousand drachmas to each.” In the stoas that faced upon the Agora the citizens heard and discussed many a new thing, from the days when the great painting of the battle of Marathon was fresh in the Painted Porch, to the time when the Stoics appropriated this colonnade. In time of war a man would look fearfully at the bulletin board near by, to see if his name was posted for military duty; or in time of truce would feel that yonder beautiful group of Peace with the child Wealth best reproduced to the eyes the blessings so often absent during the wearisome Peloponnesian wars,—blessings which Bacchylides, the admiring neighbour of Athens, had celebrated:—

To be near the Agora was a desideratum. The cripple, in Lysias’s oration, asking the Senate to continue his pension, refers to the fact that every one in Athens has his favourite lounging place: “One frequents the perfume-seller’s, another the barber’s, another the cobbler’s; and as a rule the most of them lounge into the shops set up nearest the Agora, and the very fewest resort to those most remote from it.” Socrates, too, seeking his audience where the crowds gravitated, was often heard talking “in the Market-place near the bankers’ tables.” Aristophanes, together with the other comic writers, and Lysias and Theophrastus tell not only of other resorts—like the fuller’s shop, the shield-and-spear-maker’s—but of many special sub-markets. Thus there were by the Agora the “Pottery” and the “Vegetable” Market, and, somewhere near, the “Green-cheese,” the “Garlic,” the “Wine,” the “Oil,” the “Fish” markets. Of the Bird-market we hear in some detail in Aristophanes,—the live pigeons in cages, strings of ortolans, thrushes abnormally inflated, and blackbirds with “feathers shamefully inserted in their nostrils”! In time of war the country folk thronged into town to escape the armies that were devastating Attica. In times of peace, too, they came trooping in on the first of the month, and to the oft-recurring festivals. Menander, with his blended Stoicism and Epicureanism, looks around in the crowded Agora and compares human life to a festival or market-fair:—

A broad avenue, flanked with porticoes, ran from the Market-place northwest to the Dipylon gate. This double gateway, impressive even from the remains of its foundations, quickens the memory to recall the generations of citizens and foreigners that have passed this way. Along the roads from Colonus and the Academy and the Sacred Way from Eleusis, converging outside the gates, will come a motley throng of Athenian ghosts, gay or scurrilous, militant or philosophic, to blot out the consciousness of the modern city. Outside the Dipylon, in the “Outer Cerameicus,” is “the Street of the Tombs.” Some of the beautiful monuments are still in situ to stimulate a detailed study of the rich material in the National Museum. It was here that the Athenians usually buried their dead. The roll-call of great names stirs the imagination here as in Westminster Abbey. This is no exclusive privilege of one place or people. But there is often an appropriate genius loci. As one lingers along the Appian Way, for example, deciphering inscriptions and pausing before the weather-beaten faces on the monuments, there is a lurking pessimism and an insidious melancholy that flow in from the beauty of the Roman Campagna. Here, however, in this proastion of Athens, this Suburb of the Dead, the memorials still in place, with their unpretentious sincerity, give rather a sensation of beauty and hope in perpetuating scenes from actual life. Even a scene of parting has less of hopeless finality. The warrior on his horse, the woman with her jewel-box, suggests life and love, not death and lamentation. Along yonder road from Eleusis came many an initiate fresh from the Mysteries, and some may well have been ready to listen with hope to Pindar’s “trumpet-blast for immortality”:—

Whether or no we choose to identify with Charon the old man in the boat, represented on one of the stelæ still standing, Death and Life here confront each other. Æschylus, in his early allusion to Charon’s boat, draws the contrast by an antithesis of the black sails of the ship of Theseus to the god of Light, and speaks of the “rowing” of the mourners’ arms causing—

And Euripides prepares his audience for the pathetic departure of Alcestis to the underworld by a sharp dialogue between Apollo and Death, who is at once as old and as lusty as Death in the Morality plays.

After the battle of Chæronea Philip sent back the ashes of the dead Athenians, and Demosthenes counted it the highest honour to deliver their funeral oration. But the noblest association with this spot is the great oration of Pericles, who was chosen in the course of the Peloponnesian War to pronounce the public eulogy over the dead warriors. These were borne along in cypress chests, with one empty litter to represent those whose bodies had not been recovered. The long speech is the incarnation of the Athenian spirit and of Pericles’s own undaunted policy. Thucydides represents him as saying:—

“They received praise that grows not old and a most illustrious tomb; not that in which they here are laid but wherever, as occasion arises, there remaineth the ever-living glory of their word and work. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men, and not only in their own land does an inscription upon columns tell of it, but in other lands an unwritten memory dwells within the mind of all.”

The “Cerameicus” was soon to receive Pericles. The great plague carried off the orator’s sons, and, overcome by grief and the shipwreck of his plans, he died himself in the next year.

Thucydides describes the plague with appalling vigour. The misery and danger were aggravated by the congestion of the country folk crowding in to escape the Peloponnesian invaders. Bivouacked in stifling “shacks” during the hot summer, they died uncared-for and lay where they fell, dying upon one another, at home, in the streets, or by the fountains where they had tried in vain to quench their fever.

In the “Œdipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles the plague at Thebes is pictured in terms certainly reminiscent, at least here and there, of what must have been the most awful memory of the poet’s life. The blight that has fallen alike on the land and on its inhabitants is described by the Chorus:—

Thucydides relates, too, that the Athenians discussed an ancient oracle which told how a “Dorian war will befall and a pestilence come as companion”; and that in the midst of their despair they could debate whether the oracle said “pestilence” (λοιμός) or “famine” (λιμός), either word being appropriate enough. History repeats itself. At Athens in 1906, during a virulent outbreak of smallpox, with the pest-houses overflowing, the newspapers calmly turned to the really vital question of the proper Greek word for the disease—whether it should be evloyiá (εὐλογιά), or effloyiá (εὐφλογιά).

Amidst the splendour of the public buildings the dwelling-houses long remained insignificant. The streets were dark at night. The houses had few windows to let out such light as might come from the “dim and stingy wick” of some miser watching his hoards, or from that of a perplexed father reckoning up his son’s horse-racing debts, as we find old Strepsiades doing in the “Clouds” of Aristophanes:—

In the “Wasps” the jurors, out before dawn to secure a job at the court-room, pick their way along the dark streets with only the link-boys to guard them against stumbling-stones and refuse.

The flat-roofed houses were low. Highwaymen could sit on the roofs and jump down on their victims. Burglars, who preferred a change from the conventional method of digging through the soft bricks, could climb over the house-wall. The street-mire and “Apaches” were familiar in violet-crowned Athens. Demosthenes on occasion loads his terrible Gatling gun with details picked up from the street. In his oration “Against Conon” he describes a brawl. The plaintiff recites how the said Conon and his crew had met him near the Leocorion at the Agora, tripped up his legs, trampled him in the mire, cut his lip, and bunged up his eyes; how, finally, as he lay there, Conon was egged on by the others to flap his arms like wings and to crow over him like a victorious rooster.

The Gymnasia of Athens emphasize one of the most characteristic features of Athenian life—the close interrelation of the physical and the intellectual. Here the youths were trained in their naked beauty; here the philosophers collected their data; here they afterwards taught their doctrines. To-day, unhappily, we must content ourselves with recalling the natural beauty surrounding the Academy at Colonus, or reconstructing scenes like those in the “Euthydemus,” the “Charmides,” the “Laches,” or “Lysis” of Plato. At the opening of the “Lysis” Socrates is making his way close under the outside of the north wall of the city, bound from the Academy for the Lyceum, which was probably somewhere east of the present King’s Gardens. Thus the path between Plato’s Academy and the future school of Aristotle was worn by the footsteps of their great predecessor. Socrates on this occasion, however, was deflected by an eager youth to enter a new palæstra just opened near the fountain of Panops, possibly near the gate of Diochares now placed by conjecture near the intersection of the Street of the Muses and Boulè Street. He is persuaded without difficulty and holds a discussion on Friendship with the handsome youths gathered there. In the “Charmides” likewise he goes to another palæstra, Taureas, which was near the Itonian gate, probably not far from the Olympieum. He had just come back the evening before from the engagement at Potidæa, and is eagerly questioned about the battle. As usual, he guides the talk into other channels and there follows a discussion upon Temperance.

Although the sites of the courts are uncertain, we know what went on in them. The Athenian passion for litigation is a commonplace. Lucian’s Icaromenippus, looking down from the moon on the kingdoms of the classic world, characterizes the inhabitants thus: “I could see the nomad Scyths in their wagons; the Egyptian farming; the Cilician buccaneering; the Spartan flogging; and the Athenian pettifogging.” So, in the newly organized Bird-town of Aristophanes, one of the first visitors, following hard after the parricide, is a Law-suit-hatcher. He “cannot dig,” but is not ashamed of his blackmailing trade. He comes to the birds for wings to bear him around among the Isles as “Summoner.”

The “Wasps” is a comedy directed against this frailty of the Athenians. The old Philocleon (demagogue-lover), on account of his inordinate passion for sitting on juries, is forcibly detained at home by his son who, to console his father, arranges a trial of the dog Labes (Snap) who has rushed into the kitchen and devoured a Sicilian cheese. The trial is conducted with detailed and rigorous conventionality. The defendant is finally acquitted, thanks to the puppies, who are brought into court and “whining beg him off, entreat and weep!”—a parody on the common but illegal method of influencing a jury, which Socrates scorned to adopt when on trial for his life.

With the exception of the Acropolis itself, the great Dionysiac Theatre perhaps offers most to allure the visitor. Although in its present state, with the later disfigurements of Roman times, we can only with difficulty form a detailed picture of its structure even in the fourth century, yet the slight traces of the circular orchestra, now identified beneath it, entitle the visitor to associate with this site the classic drama and to give free play to not unnatural sentiment. It is an epitome of the Athenian drama. It interprets, and is interpreted by, a wide range of literature. Here, too, in later times were gathered popular assemblies. Here, looking over plain and sea, sat generations of citizens and guests to be moved to laughter or to tears. Here the “Shameless Man” of Theophrastus managed to get himself and his children in for nothing by manipulating the places which he had purchased for his foreign visitors.

And not only could the philosopher Theophrastus find subjects for his character sketches among the theatre-goers, and turn the critics into material for his critique, but his friend, the playwright Menander, could in his comedy use the dramatic troupe as matter for his sententious characterization. Already in the time of Aristophanes the chorus was unequally constituted: some members trained as star performers to take a more active part, others to move as mutes in the background. Menander utilizes this custom to illustrate, in a fragment preserved to us, the workers and the drones of life:—