The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

>no women; they went forth, like the buccaneers, sword in hand. They

swooped down on the Ionian coast—there was at that time no power in

Asia Minor which was able to resist them. They obtained wives,

sometimes by force, sometimes by peaceable arrangement with the

natives. In course of time the coast of Asia Minor was lined with rich and

flourishing towns. The mother country continued to pour forth colonies,

and colonies also founded colonies. The Greeks sailed and settled in

every direction. They braved the dark mists and the inclement seasons of

the Black Sea, and took up their abode among a people whose faces were

almost concealed in furs, who dwelt at the mouths of great rivers and

cultivated boundless plains of wheat. This wheat the Greeks exported to

the mother country, with barrels of the salted tunny-fish, and the gold of

Ural, and even the rich products of the Oriental trade which were brought

across Asia from India or China by the waters of the Oxus to the Aral

Sea, from the Aral to the Caspian Sea by land, from the Caspian to the

Black Sea by the Volga and the Don.

 

But where Italy dipped her arched and lovely foot in the blue waters of an

untroubled sea, beneath the blue roof of an unclouded sky—where the

flowers never perished, where eternal summer smiled, where mere

existence was voluptuous and life itself a sensual joy—there the Greek

cities clustered richly together—cities shining with marble and built in

fairy forms, before them the deep tranquil harbour, behind them violet

valleys, myrtle groves, and green lakes of waving corn.

 

When a bank of emigrants went forth they took with them fire kindled on

the city hearth. Although each colony was independent, it regarded with

reverence the mother state, and all considered themselves with pride not

foreigners but Greeks; for Greece was not a country but a people;

wherever the Greek language was spoken, that was Greece. They all

spoke the same grand and harmonious language—although the dialects

might differ; they had the same bible, for Homer was in all their hearts,

and the memory of their youthful glory was associated in their minds with

the union of Greek warriors beneath the walls of Troy. The chief colonial

states were represented at the meetings of the Amphictyonic League, and

any Greek from the Crimea to Marseilles might contend at the Olympian

Games with the full rights of a Spartan or Athenian, a privilege which the

Great King could by no means have obtained.

 

The intense enthusiasm which was excited by the Olympian Games was

the chief cause of the remarkable development of Greece. The man who

won the olive garland on that celebrated course was famous for ever

afterwards. His statue was erected in the public hall at Delphi; he was

received by his native city with all the honours of a formal triumph; he

was not allowed to enter by the gates—a part of the city wall was beaten

down. The city itself became during five years the talk of Greece, and

wherever its people travelled they were welcomed with congratulations

and esteem.

 

The passion for praise is innate in the human mind. It is only natural that

throughout the whole Greek world a spirit of eager rivalry and emulation

should prevail. In every city was established a gymnasium where crowds

of young men exercised themselves naked. This institution was

originally intended for those only who were in training for the Olympian

Games, but afterwards it became a part of daily life, and the Greeks went

to the gymnasium with the same regularity as the Romans went to the

bath.

 

At first the national prizes were only for athletes, but at a later period the

principle of competition was extended to books and musical

compositions, paintings and statues. There was also a competition in rich

and elegant display. The carriages and retinues which were exhibited

upon the course excited a desire to obtain wealth, and gave a useful

impulse to foreign commerce, manufactures, and mining operations.

 

The Greek world was composed of municipal aristocracies—societies of

gentlemen living in towns, with their farms in the neighbourhood, and

having all their work done for them by slaves. They themselves had

nothing to do but to cultivate their bodies by exercise in the gymnasium,

and their minds by conversation in the market-place. They lived out of

doors while their wives remained shut up at home. In Greece a lady

could only enter society by adopting a mode of life which in England

usually facilitates her exit. The Greeks spent little money on their wives,

their houses, or their food: the rich men were expected to give dramatic

entertainments , and to contribute a company or a man-of-war for the

protection of the city. The market-place was the Greek club. There the

merchants talked their business—the labours of the desk were then

unknown. The philosopher instructed his pupils under the shade of a

plane-tree, or strolling up and down a garden path. Mingling with the

song of the cicada from the boughs might be heard the chipping of the

chisel from the workshop of the sculptor, and the laughter and shouts

from the gymnasium. And sometimes the tinkle of a harp would be

heard; a crowd would be collected, and a rhapsodist would recite a scene

from the Iliad, every word of which his audience knew by heart, as an

audience at Naples or Milan knows every bar of the opera which is about

to be performed. Sometimes a citizen would announce that his guest,

who had just arrived from the sea of Azov or the Pillars of Hercules,

would read a paper on the manners and customs of the barbarians. It was

in the city that the book was first read and the statue exhibited—the

rehearsal and the private view; it was in Olympia that they were

published to the nation. When the public murmured in delight around a

picture of Xeuxis or a statue of Praxiteles, when they thundered in

applause to an ode by Pindar or a lecture by Herodotus, how many

hundreds of young men must have gone home with burning brows and

throbbing hearts, devoured by the love of fame! And when we consider

that though the geographical Greece is a small country, the true Greece-

—that is to say, the land inhabited by the Greeks—was in reality a large

country; when we consider with what an immense number of ideas they

must have been brought in contact on the shores of the Black Sea, in Asia

Minor, in Southern Italy, in Southern France, in Egypt, and in Northern

Africa; when we consider that, owing to those noble contests of Olympia,

city was every contending against city, and within the city man against

man, there is surely no longer anything mysterious in the exceptional

development of that people.

 

Education in Greece was not a monopoly; it was the precious privilege of

all the free. The business of religion was divided among three classes.

The priests were merely the sacrificers and guardians of the sanctuary;

they were elected, like the mayors of our towns, by their fellow citizens

for a limited time only, and without their being withdrawn from the

business of ordinary life. The poets revealed the nature, and portrayed

the character, and related the biography of the gods. The philosophers

undertook the education of the young, and were also the teachers and

preachers of morality. If a man wished to obtain the favour of the gods,

or to take divine advice, he went to a priest; if he desired to turn his mind

to another, though scarcely a better world, he took up his Homer or his

Hesiod; and if he suffered from sickness or mental affliction he sent for a

philosopher.

 

It will presently be shown that the philosophers invaded the territory of

the poets, who were defended by the government and by the mob, and

that a religious persecution was the result. But the fine arts were free;

and the custom which came into vogue of erecting statues to the gods, to

the victors of the games, and to other illustrious men favoured the

progress of sculpture, which was also aided by the manners of the land.

The gymnasium was a school of art. The eyes of the sculptor revelled on

the naked form—not purchased, as in London, at eighteenpence an hour,

but visible in marvellous perfection at all times and in every pose. Thus

ever present to the eye of the artist, it was ever present to his brain, and

flowed forth from his fingers in lovely forms. As art was fed by nature,

so nature was fed by art. The Greek women placed statues of Apollo or

Narcissus in their bedrooms, that they might bear children as beautiful as

those on whom they gazed. Such children they prayed the gods to give

them, for the Greeks loved beauty to distraction, and regarded ugliness as

sin. They had exhibitions of beauty at which prizes were given by

celebrated artists who were appointed to the judgment-seat. There were

towns in which the most beautiful men were elected to the priesthood.

There were connoisseurs who formed companies of soldiers composed

exclusively of comely young men, and who could plead for the life of a

beautiful youth amidst the wrath and confusion of the battlefield.

 

The Persian wars gave a mighty impulse to the intellect of Greece.

Indeed, before that period Greek art had been uncouth; it was then that

the Age of Marble really began, and that Phidias moulded the ideas of

Homer into noble forms. It was then that Athens, having commanded the

Greeks in the War of Independence, retained the supremacy and became

the centre of the nation. Athens had died for Greece; it had been burnt by

the Persians to the ground, and from those glorious ashes arose the

Athens of history—the City of the Violet Crown. To Athens were

summoned the great artists: to Athens came every young man who had

talent and ambition: to Athens every Greek who could afford it sent his

boys to school. The Academy was planted with wide-spreading plane-trees and olive groves, laid out in walks with fountains, and surrounded

by a wall. A theatre was built entirely of masts which had been taken

from the enemy. A splendid harbour was constructed—a harbour which

was in itself a town. All that fancy could create, all that money could

command, was lavished upon the city and its environs—the very

milestones on the roads were works of art.

 

The Persians assisted the growth of Greece, not only by those invasions

which had favoured the union, aroused the ardour, multiplied the desires,

and ennobled the ambition of the Greek people, but also by their own

conquests. Their failure in Europe and their success in Asia were equally

profitable to the Greeks. Trade and travel were much facilitated by their

extensive rule. A government postal service had been established: royal

couriers might by seen every day galloping at full speed along the

splendid roads which united the provinces of the Punjab and Afghanistan

and Bokhara on one side of the Euphrates, and of Asia Minor, Syria and

Egypt on the other side of that river, with the imperial palaces at Babylon,

Susa, Ecbatana, and Persepolis. Caravanserais were fitted up for the

reception of travellers in lonely places where no other houses were to be

found. Troops of mounted police patrolled the roads. In desert tracts

thousands of earthen jars, filled with water and planted up to their necks

in sand, supplied the want of wells. The old system of national isolation

and closed ports was battered down. The Greeks were no longer

forbidden to enter the Phoenician ports, or compelled to trade exclusively

at one Egyptian town. Greek merchants were able to join in the caravan

trade of Central Asia,