As the fame of the Library spread, students from all over the Greek world came to Alexandria, and there was a great demand for additional copies of the works in the Library. For more than three centuries, Alexandria was the great book-producing mart in the world. The Museum possessed a good collection of the best known copies of the works of the classic writers, and Ptolemy Philadelphus very much enlarged this collection. He bought every copy of all existing Greek works he could find, and as he paid very high prices for them, there was a steady flow of books to Alexandria from all over the civilized world. It is said that he refused to send food to the Athenians at a time of famine unless they agreed to give him certain copies they still possessed of the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. He paid liberally for them, not only in the promised shipment of corn but also in silver.
As more and more copies of the classic writers were wanted, a regular publishing trade arose in Alexandria. Callimachus was not only the Librarian of the Library, but a publisher of the works of classic writers. Large numbers of copyists were employed whose business it was to make careful and accurate copies of the works required. This accounts for the fact that in certain works of ancient literature it is sometimes difficult to know what is the really original form of certain lines or passages, because in spite of their care, the copyists made mistakes, and unfortunately many original copies of the classics were lost in the great fire which destroyed the Library in the last century B.C. The Alexandrian school of copyists was a very famous one, and Alexandrian Editions of the classics were considered the very best to be had.
Not only were Greek works copied, but other literature was translated into Greek and then copied. It was in Alexandria that the oldest manuscript of the Old Testament we possess was transcribed. It was a translation of the whole of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, made, according to tradition, by a group of seventy Jewish scholars, whence comes its name, the Septuagint. These scholars were encouraged to undertake this work by the King, who is said to have provided the means for their support whilst they were engaged on the translation, and who gave them a special quarter of the city in which to live.
Greek science had been born in Ionia, and during the Hellenic Period of Greek civilization, it had gone hand in hand with philosophy. The earliest days of pure science came in the Hellenistic Age, and its home was in Alexandria. Amongst the many names of men of this time who contributed something of value to science, there are two which must be remembered: those of Euclid and Archimedes.
Euclid lived in Alexandria. He was a mathematician and wrote a great work on geometry. No scientific work in the world has lived in quite the same way as has this book of Euclid, for since the time that the Elements of Euclid were written, it was used as a school text book without interruption until a very few years ago.
Archimedes was probably the greatest of the Greek scientific thinkers of the third century B.C. He did not live in Alexandria; he was a native of Syracuse in Sicily, but he was in close touch with all the scientific work that was being done there. He was a great scientific investigator, the inventor of many practical and ingenious devices and discovered the principle of moving heavy bodies by means of pulleys and levers. An extraordinarily large ship was made for the King of Syracuse, a ship of marvel to that age. It contained a gymnasium, gardens of most wonderful beauty and full of rich plants, a temple to Aphrodite, a drawing-room with its walls and doors of boxwood, having a bookcase in it, a bath-room with three brazen vessels for holding hot water, and a fish-pond. All the furnishings were of the most exquisite craftsmanship, and all the rooms had floors of mosaic, in which the whole story of the Iliad was depicted in a most marvellous manner. There were doors of ivory, beautiful couches, and it was full of pictures and statues, goblets and vases of every form and shape imaginable. But the ship was so large that no one could move it. Archimedes, however, we are told, launched it by himself with the aid of only a few people. For having prepared a helix (probably some mechanical contrivance with pulleys), he drew this vessel, enormous as it was, down to the sea. And it was said that Archimedes was the first person who ever invented this helix.[1]
Archimedes believed it possible to move greater bodies even than the ship, and he is said to have boasted: "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the earth."
This great inventor did other things which struck the imagination of the men amongst whom he lived, for of some of them they had never seen the like before. During the siege of Syracuse by the Romans, in 212 B.C., Archimedes invented marvellous war-engines: strange grappling hooks which, it was said, could seize an enemy's ship and overturn it in the sea, and he showed the Syracusans how to set up a water pump in their ships, so that should water get into the hold, it could be pumped out and the ship saved from sinking. He is also said to have made some arrangement of mirrors and burning glass by means of which the Roman ships were set on fire. But in spite of all these inventions, the Romans took the city, and Archimedes was killed. He was found by a Roman soldier, sitting in his house and paying no heed to any danger, but intent on drawing mathematical diagrams on the ground. Looking up and seeing the enemy, all he said was: "Stand away, fellow, from my diagram." The soldier, not knowing who he was, killed him.
It is said that on his deathbed Alexander bequeathed his empire "to the strongest," but there was no one general able enough or strong enough to succeed him, and for about fifty years after his death, his empire was torn by strife and bloodshed. At last some kind of peace and order was restored, but the one great empire of Alexander had disappeared, and the civilized world was broken up into a number of independent states, of which the most important were the Kingdoms of Syria, Egypt and Macedonia. During the long wars which had preceded this settlement, many battles had been fought on Greek soil. The Greeks were not strong enough to prevent this and neither were they able to maintain their independence when Macedonia became a kingdom. She was too powerful and strong a neighbour and Greece fell under her rule. Tyrants were established in the Greek cities, a deep humiliation to the freedom-loving Greek.
But once more the old Greek spirit flared up and the tyrants were driven out. From time to time in the history of Greece, states had joined together in various leagues and alliances, but the inability of the Greeks to combine for long, even when their very life demanded it, had prevented such leagues from lasting any great length of time. But in 281 B.C. when once again the independence of Greece was threatened, one of these old leagues was revived, the Achaean League. It lasted for nearly a century and is of the greatest interest to modern times, for until the union of the American states, about two thousand years later, there was nothing in the history of the world like it again.
The Achaean League was not an alliance, but a real federation of states, with one central government. Each separate state kept its own sovereign rights over all its domestic affairs, but questions of war and peace, the support of the army, and all relations with foreign states were controlled by the federal government. It was the only experiment in ancient times of real federal government.
The head of the League was called the General, and it was under the general Aratus that it became very powerful. Almost all the more important of the Greek states entered the League, with the exception of Athens and Sparta. Neither by persuasion, nor by force, unless she might be recognized as head of the League, would Sparta consent to become a member, and so powerful was she in the Peloponnesus that Aratus begged the aid of Macedonia to subdue her. Sparta was conquered, but Macedonia regained her supremacy in Greece, and the power of the Achaean League was broken.
The old Greece of history no longer existed. Greek civilization had spread over the Mediterranean world, but the free and independent city-state had disappeared and nothing lasting had taken its place. Alexander himself, and still more his successors, had failed to create an empire which gave to those who belonged to it any sense of citizenship in it. The Hellenistic world was a Greek civilization, but it failed to arouse in men of Greek birth that patriotism which the city-state had inspired.
The creation of a world state of which men were to be proud to call themselves citizens and for which they would gladly die, was to be the work of another great power, which even as the old Greece was passing, was growing strong in the West. Rome was steadily conquering the civilized world. Already she ruled over Italy and was extending her power over the Eastern Mediterranean. She conquered Macedonia, and one by one the old free states of Greece and those of the Achaean League lost their independence, until in 146 B.C. Corinth, rich, commercial, gay Corinth, was taken by Rome, and Greece became a Roman province. The citizens of this great state, which was to include, not only Greece and the Levant, but the whole Mediterranean and lands far beyond its shores, were to be proud of the name of Roman. Yet Rome, destined to be the Mistress of the World, and in political power an empire, succeeding where Greece had failed, owed all that was most worth while in the things of the higher intellectual life of the mind to Greece. The Greek spirit was never to die.
[1] From Athenaeus.
This book has been intended for those who were reading about Greece for the first time. The following list is for those older readers of the book who would like to know more about this great civilization. It only contains suggestions as to how to begin, and is therefore not in any way a complete bibliography.
I. Books about Greece
GROTE. History of Greece. This book was written some time ago, but it is still the most famous history of Greece.
C. H. and H. B. HAWES. Crete the Forerunner of Greece.
BAIKIE. The Sea Kings of Crete.
R. W. LIVINGSTONE. The Greek Genius and its Meaning to Us.
R. W. LIVINGSTONE. (Edited by) The Pageant of Greece.
R. W. LIVINGSTONE. (Edited by) The Legacy of Greece.
GILBERT MURRAY. The Rise of the Greek Epic.
A. E. ZIMMERN. The Greek Commonwealth.
E. N. GARDINER. Greek Athletic Sports and Festivals.
ETHEL B. ABRAHAMS. Greek Dress.
EMILY JAMES PUTNAM. The Lady.
E. POTTIER. Douris and the Painters of Greek Vases.
G. M. A. RICHTER. The Craft of Athenian Pottery.
G. M. A. RICHTER. Handbook to the Classical Collection in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. An excellent introduction to the study of Greek Art.
KENNETH J. FREEMAN. The Schools of Hellas.
A. E. HAIGH. The Attic Theatre.
E. A. GARDNER. A Handbook of Greek Sculpture.
D. G. HOGARTH. Philip and Alexander.
PUTNAM. Authors and their Public in Ancient Times.
MAHAFFY. Social Life in Greece.
MAHAFFY. Alexander's Empire.
II. Greek Writers
No reading about Greece can take the place of reading what the Greeks themselves wrote. References to Greek writers will have been found all through this book and in the list of acknowledgments at the beginning. The following list of the more important writers and their works referred to in this book has been put together for the purpose of easier reference.
HOMER. The Iliad, translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers.
HOMER. The Odyssey, translated by Butcher and Lang.
HOMER. The Homeric Hymns, translated by Andrew Lang.
AESCHYLUS. Translated by A. S. Way and also by E. M. Cookson.
AESCHYLUS. The Agamemnon, translated by Gilbert Murray.
SOPHOCLES. Translated by R. C. Jebb.
SOPHOCLES. Oedipus, King of Thebes, translated by Gilbert Murray.
EURIPIDES. Translated by Gilbert Murray.
ARISTOPHANES. Translated by B. B. Rogers.
The Frogs, translated by Gilbert Murray.
PLATO. Translated by Benjamin Jowett.
PLATO. The Republic, translated by Davies and Vaughan.
PLATO. Trial and Death of Socrates, translated by F. J. Church.
ARISTOTLE. Politics, translated by Benjamin Jowett and also by J. E. C. Welldon.
HERODOTUS. Translated by G. C. Macaulay.
THUCYDIDES. Translated by Benjamin Jowett.
XENOPHON. Translated by H. G. Dakyns.
PLUTARCH. Translated by Dryden, revised by A. H. Clough.
DEMOSTHENES. Public Orations, translated by A. W. Pickard-Cambridge.
The Claim of Antiquity, an excellent pamphlet published by the Oxford University Press, gives a much fuller and more complete list of books and translations for those who would like further suggestions.
III. Greek Sculpture and Architecture
Not every one can go to Greece or even to Sicily, but most museums have good collections of casts and models. Greek sculpture is not all found in one place, but scattered through the museums of the world. Those who can go to London, Paris, Rome and Naples, if nowhere else, can get first-hand knowledge of some of the greatest things the Greeks produced. For the sculptures from the Parthenon are in the British Museum; most beautiful things are in the Museo delle Terme in Rome (to see the other half of the Throne of Aphrodite one must go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts), and Sophocles is in the Museum of the Lateran. From Naples one can go to Paestum, once the Greek colony of Poseidonia, famous in ancient times for its roses, and see the Temple of Poseidon. It has never been restored, and is one of the best preserved Greek temples to be seen anywhere out of Attica. There it stands, as it has stood for over two thousand years, looking out towards the sea, solitary, now, and desolate, yet in its loneliness most beautiful.
All these things are merely suggestions as to one way of beginning. Those who begin will find no difficulty in going on.
A
Achaean League, 407
Acropolis, 91, 190, 194; temples on, 278 ff.; later history of 284 ff.
Aegean civilization, 5
Aeschylus, 107, 163, 390, 395, 402, 412
Aethiopians, 44
Agamemnon of Aeschylus, 391, 395, 412
Alaric the Goth, 284
Alcestis of Euripides, 393, 412
Alcibiades; early life of, 302 ff.; Sicilian expedition, 305 ff.; summoned to Athens, 309; the traitor, 310 ff.; recalled to Athens, 314; exiled, 315
Alcmaeonids, 104
Alexander; youth and education, 342 ff.; policy, 345; conquests of 347 ff.; death of, 356; empire of, 398, 406
Alexandria, 400 ff.; Museum at, 401; Library, 401; book-publishing in, 402; science in 404 ff.
Alexandrian editions, 403
Amphipolis, 301
Amphora, 203
Anabasis of Xenophon, 318, 320, 412
Anaximander, 112
Antigone of Sophocles, 392, 412
Aphrodite, 51
Apology of Socrates, 371, 373, 374
Aratus, 407
Archimedes, 404
Architecture, 277 ff.
Archon, 94
Ariadne, 7
Aristeides; character of, 156; rivalry with Themistocles, 156; ostracism of, 158; return of, 162; forms Delian League, 180
Aristophanes; comedies of, 209, 300, 393, 412
Aristotle; Politics of, 72, 384, 412; views on education, 227, 384; tutor to Alexander the Great, 344; at the Lyceum, 383; will of, 383; "Father of Natural Science," 383
Artaxerxes, 317
Artemisium, 149
Athena, 47, 48, 50; birth of, 280; contest with Poseidon, 92, 281; symbol of Athens, 283
Athenian Dress, 195 ff.
Athenian Education, 221 ff.
Athenian Government; rule of one man, 91 ff.; oligarchy, rule of the few, 94 ff.; rule of the many, 96 ff.
Athenian House, 198
Athenian Life, 190 ff.
Athenian Pottery, 203 ff.
Athenian Trade, 201
Athens; situation and appearance, 190 ff.; classes of people, 194; burnt by Xerxes, 161; burnt by Mardonius, 168; during Persian War, 144; Long Walls, 173, 298; fortifications of, 172; becomes an empire, 183; enemies of, 291 ff.; during Peloponnesian War, 296 ff.; downfall of, 315
Athos, Mount, 126
Assembly; Spartan, 79; Athenian, 210, 299
B
Bema, 210
Brasidas, 301
C
Cadmus, 324
Callimachus, 403
Caryatid, 280
Cecrops, 91
Cerameicus, 204
Chaeronea, 332
Chiton, 195
Chlamys, 196
Cimon, 93
Citizenship, Greek ideals of, 73 ff.
City-State, 70 ff.
Cleon, 301
Clio, 49
Clouds of Aristophanes, 300, 412
Colonies, 108 ff.; Ionian, 110 ff.; in Italy, 113; in Sicily, 113; in Egypt, 113
Constitution of the Lacedaemonians of Xenophon, 88
Corinth; council at, 145; urges Sparta to make war on Athens, 291; fall of, 408
Crete, 6 ff.; legends of, 7 ff.; dress, 11; writing, 15; religion, 13; life in, 16 ff.; amusements, 18
Crito, 374
Croesus, 100 ff.; conquers Ionian colonies, 115; war with Cyrus, 116
Cunaxa, 319
Cylon, 103
Cyrus the Great, 115; conquers Sardis, 116; conquers Ionian colonies, 117
Cyrus the Younger, 318 ff.
D
Daedalus, 8
Darius, 118 ff.; Scythian expedition of, 118 ff.; determines to invade Greece, 124, 126
Delos, 128; Confederacy of, 180
Delphi, 43; oracle at, 57 ff.; Treasury of Athenians at, 134
Demeter, 54 ff.
Deucalion, 42
Diogenes, 346
Dionysus, 232
Dodona, 57
Dorians, 75
Draco, 98
Drama, 233
Dramatists; Aeschylus, 390; Aristophanes, 393; Euripides, 392; Sophocles, 392
Dress; Athenian, 195; Cretan, 11; Homeric, 28
E
Economist of Xenophon, 198, 215, 216, 412
Education; Athenian, 221 ff.; Spartan, 84 ff.
Electra of Euripides, 393, 412
Elysian Fields, 44
Empire; Athenian, 183, 282; Alexander's, 398, 406
Epaminondas, 325 ff.
Ephors, 80
Erechtheum, 279
Eretria; joins Ionian revolt, 123; burnt by Persians, 128
Euclid, 404
Euripides, 39, 109, 226, 234, 238, 300, 392 ff., 402, 412
Evans, Sir Arthur, 12
F
Funeral Speech, 187
G
Games; Isthmian, 61; Olympic, 60 ff.; Pythian, 61
Gordian Knot, 347
Greece; divisions of, 37; trees of, 37; products of, 38; climate of, 39
Greek Art, 394 ff.
Greek Characteristics, 40
H
Hades, 54 ff.
Hecataeus, 112
Hellenic Period, 399
Hellenica of Xenophon, 315,316, 327, 412
Hellespont, 141
Hellenistic Age, 398 ff.
Helots, 76
Hephaestus, 50
Hera, 47
Hermes of Praxiteles, 222, 395
Herodas, translation from Mime III, 228 ff.
Herodotus, 39, 78, 111, 115, 117, 118 ff., 136 ff., 174, 282, 385 ff., 412
Himation, 196
Hipparchus, 106
Hippolytus of Euripides, 234, 412
Historians; Herodotus, 385 ff.; Plutarch, 389; Thucydides, 386 ff.; Xenophon, 388
Homeric Age, 27 ff.; dress, 28; palaces, 28 ff.; furniture, 30 ff.
Homeric Hymns, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 58, 281, 411
Houses; Athenian, 198 ff.; Cretan, 16; Homeric, 28
Hydria, 203
Hyperboreans, 43
I
Iliad, 6, 8, 19, 20, 22, 46, 68, 106, 402, 411
Ionian Colonies, 110, 202; conquered by Croesus, 115; conquered by Cyrus, 117; appeal to Athens for help, 174
Ionian Revolt, 122
Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides, 238 ff.; 393, 412
Isthmian Games, 61
K
King's Peace, 317
Knights of Aristophanes, 300, 412
Knossos, 8; palace of, 10; destruction of, 20
Krater, 203
L
Lacedaemonians, 75
Laconia, 75
Lade, 124
Laurium, 156
Lawgivers; Draco, 98; Lycurgus, 76 ff.; Solon, 96 ff.
Lekythos, 203
Leonidas, 148
Lesbos, 112
Leuctra, 327
Lyceum, 383
Lycurgus, 76 ff.; travels of, 77; at Delphi, 78; government of, 76 ff.; death of, 90
Lydia, 114
M
Macedonians, 329
Magna Graecia, 113
Mantinea, 327
Map-makers, 112
Marathon, 130 ff.
Mediterranean, 3 ff.
Memorabilia of Xenophon, 278, 373
Metopes, 282
Minoan Civilization, 8
Minos, 7
Miletus, 111, 202; siege of by Lydia, 114; revolt against Darius, 122; fall of, 124
Militiades, 131
Muses, 49
Music, 227
Mycenaean Civilization, 5
N
Naucratis, 113
Nicias, 302
O