to lead Greece? But such an idea was intolerable; it was not in our nature; it was not in our traditions. No one from the beginning of time has ever persuaded us to throw in our lot with might that was not right, to accept the security of slaves, or to shirk at any moment of our history the risks of the battle for pre-eminence, for honour, and for renown. So august, so consonant with your character do you think such principles that the Athenians of the past whom you chiefly praise are those that have observed them. You are right. Could any one fail to admire the courage of the men who would not take orders from a foreigner, but rather endured to embark and leave their country and city, choosing as their general, Themistocles, who had proposed this policy, and stoning Cyrsilus who urged them to comply with the Persians' demands.1 They stoned him, and their wives stoned his wife. The Athenians of the age of Marathon did not look for statesmen and generals who would make them prosperous slaves: they would not live, if they could not live in freedom. Each of them considered himself born for his country as well as for his father and mother. Where is the difference? Why, a man who looks on himself as born for his parents waits for the day of doom and the coming of death; the other will go to meet death to keep his country free, and is less afraid of it than of the insults and dishonour that a defeated people must endure.

If I presumed to say that it was I who inspired you with a spirit worthy of your past, there is not a man present who might not properly rebuke me. But my point is that these principles of conduct were your own, that this spirit existed in the city before me, but that in its particular application I had merely my share as your servant. Aeschines, however, denounces our policy as a whole, invokes your resentment against me as responsible for the city's terrors and risks, and in his anxiety to wrest from me the distinction of an hour, robs you of glories which will endure for ever. If you decide that my policy was wrong, you will make

1 He alludes to the Persian invasion of 480, when for strategic reasons the Athenians evacuated their town and allowed the enemy to occupy it.

it seem that your misfortunes are due, not to the unkindness of fortune, but to a mistake of your own. But it is not true, gentlemen, it is not true that you were mistaken when you took upon you that peril for the freedom and safety of Greece. No, by our fathers, who were first to face the danger at Marathon; by those who stood in the ranks at Plataea; by the fleets of Salamis and Artemisium; by all those many others who lie in the sepulchres of the Nation, brave men whom Athens honoured and buried, all alike, Aeschines, not the successful only, nor only the victorious. She did well. They have all done what brave men may; their fate is that which God assigned.1

The following extract from the treatise On the Sublime ' (first or second century A.D.), which goes under the name of Longinus, contains a subtle analysis of the above passage and is a good example of later Greek literary criticism.

D

EMOSTHENES is producing an argument in favour of

his policy. What was the natural way to treat it? Something like this: You were not wrong when you took upon you that peril for the freedom of Greece. Your history proves it; for the fighters of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea were not wrong.' Instead, as by a sudden divine inspiration, he utters the oath by the heroes of Greece; 'You were not wrong, no, by those who were first to face the danger at Marathon.' He seems by this apostrophe to deify the ancestors of his audience; he suggests by his phrase that we ought to swear by men who died thus, as we swear by gods. He infuses into the minds of his judges the spirit of these fighters, and transforms a logical argument into transcendent and sublime emotion and into the conviction which so novel and extraordinary an oath extorts. At the same time he insinuates the healing and antiseptic thought, that they should be as proud of their struggle with Philip as of the victories of Marathon and Salamis. . . . He has framed his oath for men who were beaten, so that Chaeronea might cease to

1 On the Crown, 199 f.

seem a disaster. . . . He was open to the retort: 'You are speaking of a defeat that occurred in your administration, and yet you invoke the memory of a victory.' So he adjusts his language to avoid this objection, teaching that even in our inspiration we should keep a steady head. By those', he says, 'who were the first to face the danger at Marathon; by the fleets of Salamis and Artemisium; by those who stood in the ranks at Plataea.' He never uses the word ' conquered', but suppresses any phrase indicating the result, since the Persian Wars were a triumph, and Chaeronea the opposite. Then, before his hearers can reflect, he carries them off their feet with the words 'whom Athens honoured and buried; all alike, Aeschines, not the successful only'1

1 c. 16.

XIII

THEOCRITUS AND THE EPIGRAMMATISTS

'I should be content to die, if I had written anything equal to this.' TENNYSON, after reading the 13th Idyll of Theocritus.1

Two years after his great victory at Chaeronea Philip dies, and is succeeded by his son, the nineteen-year-old Alexander. Greece sees her chance, revolts, and is at once struck down. A year later Alexander, aged twenty-one, is chosen commander-in-chief of the Greek forces, for a campaign against Persia. The Macedonian conquest has proved a blessing in disguise. At last Greece is united: her arms, so long used against herself, are turned against a foreign enemy: she goes out to achieve the spiritual and intellectual conquest of the world, and to carry to others the culture hitherto almost confined to her own land. It is the birth of Hellenism-a development comparable to the change of Christianity from a Jewish sect to a world mission, and hardly less momentous.

In the next ten years we see Alexander as conqueror of Persia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt: he crosses the Indus and reaches the Beas; then returns to die in Babylon, after a drinking bout, in 323, at the age of thirty-two. He leaves behind him cities such as Alexandria, centres of Greek culture in Eastern lands, and a great empire that falls asunder into kingdoms, ruled by Hellenized monarchs, the descendants of his generals. The most important of these kingdoms, Macedonia (with Greece), Syria, and Egypt, bear rule with varying fortunes till, one by one, they are eaten up by Rome, Macedonia in 146, Syria in 64, Egypt in 30 B.C.

By its prestige Athens remains the mother city of Hellenism: but other centres, especially Alexandria, become not less important. The chief poets, the great scientists of the period live in Sicily,

The lines specially referred to are those describing Heracles calling to the boy Hylas, who had been carried off by the water nymphs.

τρὶς μὲν Ὕλαν ἄυσεν . . .

τρὶς δ ̓ ἄρ ̓ ὁ παῖς ὑπάκουσεν, ἀραιὰ δ ̓ ἵκετο φωνὰ

ἐξ ὕδατος παρεὼν δὲ μάλα σχεδὸν εἴδετο πόρρω.

'Thrice he called Hylas ... and thrice the boy heard him, and thin his voice came from the water, and though very near he seemed far away.'

Alexandria, and elsewhere. As a political force Greece is null, as a world influence she is supreme. Greek culture, like a flood, saturates everything in its reach. Rome takes from Greece her philosophy and science, her models and chief inspiration in every branch of literature, her doctors and artists and professors. A Roman poet wrote, Conquered Greece took her conqueror captive and paradoxical Germans have held (quite falsely) that the chief value of Roman literature is as the vehicle of Greek ideas to the after-world. Her gifts are welcomed, except in one place. The struggles of the Maccabees, the second-century patriots of Judaea, are against the Hellenism which their Syrian masters wish to impose; yet S. Paul and the evangelists write in Greek, and not only is the doctrine of the first chapter of S. John cast in Greek philosophical terms, but Christian thought from the first is moulded by Greek ideas and developed by Greek thinkers.

At last the splendid flame of Hellenism is buried under the ruins of the Roman Empire, or survives pallid and flickering in the Greek Empire of Constantinople, till, rediscovered by the West, it lights the fires of the Renaissance.

Greek literature did not end with Greek independence; it became cosmopolitan and continued to flower in widely diffused centres of Hellenism. Menander, the chief master of comedy, was an Athenian, but, to take five famous later names, the poet Theocritus came from Sicily, the philosophers Epictetus and Dio Chrysostom from towns in Asia Minor, the satirist Lucian from Samosata in Syria, the epigrammatist Meleager from Gadara in Palestine. Jews like Philo, Josephus, S. Paul, Romans like M. Aurelius and Aelian, write in Greek. The most important centre of Greek culture in the third century B. C. was Alexandria, where literature and science flourished under the Ptolemies.

It would require pages to enumerate the different varieties of this literature, which ranges from philosophy to novels, from epics to guide-books, from science to sermons. Its quality is not contemptible. Much of it indeed is belles-bettres rather than literature, the work of scholars and men of letters, who understood the art of writing and lived in an educated and cultured society; some of it is disfigured by the affectations of the littérateur or the pedantry of the scholar. Yet the vast majority of Greek epigrams were written after 300 B. C. And as the afterworld has produced no epic to rival Homer, so it has produced no body of epigrams comparable to these. The Bucolics of