Part 1 (1/2)

A Day In Old Athens.

by William Stearns Davis.

Preface

This little book tries to describe what an intelligent person would see and hear in ancient Athens, if by some legerdemain he were translated to the fourth century B.C. and conducted about the city under competent guidance. Rare happenings have been omitted and sometimes, to avoid long explanations, PROBABLE matters have been stated as if they were ascertained facts; but these instances are few, and it is hoped no reader will be led into serious error.

The year 360 B.C. has been selected for the hypothetical time of this visit, not because of any special virtue in that date, but because Athens was then architecturally almost perfect, her civic and her social life seemed at their best, the democratic const.i.tution held its vigor, and there were few outward signs of the general decadence which was to set in after the triumph of Macedon.

I have endeavored to state no facts and to make no allusions, that will not be fairly obvious to a reader who has merely an elementary knowledge of Greek annals, such information, for instance, as may be gained through a good secondary school history of ancient times.

This naturally has led to comments and descriptions which more advanced students may find superfluous.

The writer has been under a heavy debt to the numerous and excellent works on Greek ”Private Antiquities” and ”Public Life” written in English, French, or German, as well as to the various great Cla.s.sical Encyclopaedias and Dictionaries, and to many treatises and monographs upon the topography of Athens and upon the numerous phases of Attic culture. It is proper to say, however, that the material from such secondary sources has been merely supplementary to a careful examination of the ancient Greek writers, with the objects of this book kept especially in view. A sojourn in modern Athens, also, has given me an impression of the influence of the Attic landscape upon the conditions of old Athenian life, an impression that I have tried to convey in this small volume.

I am deeply grateful to my sister, Mrs. Fannie Davis Gifford, for helpful criticism of this book while in ma.n.u.script; to my wife, for preparing the drawings from Greek vase-paintings which appear as ill.u.s.trations; and to my friend and colleague, Professor Charles A. Savage, for a kind and careful reading of the proofs. Thanks also are due to Henry Holt and Company for permission to quote material from their edition of Von Falke's ”Greece and Rome.”

W. S. D.

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

May, 1914.

Chapter I. The Physical Setting of Athens.

1. The Importance of Athens in Greek History.--To three ancient nations the men of the twentieth century owe an incalculable debt.

To the Jews we owe most of our notions of religion; to the Romans we owe traditions and examples in law, administration, and the general management of human affairs which still keep their influence and value; and finally, to the Greeks we owe nearly all our ideas as to the fundamentals of art, literature, and philosophy, in fact, of almost the whole of our intellectual life. These Greeks, however, our histories promptly teach us, did not form a single unified nation. They lived in many ”city-states” of more or less importance, and some of the largest of these contributed very little directly to our civilization. Sparta, for example, has left us some n.o.ble lessons in simple living and devoted patriotism, but hardly a single great poet, and certainly never a philosopher or sculptor. When we examine closely, we see that the civilized life of Greece, during the centuries when she was accomplis.h.i.+ng the most, was peculiarly centered at Athens. Without Athens, Greek history would lose three quarters of its significance, and modern life and thought would become infinitely the poorer.

2. Why the Social Life of Athens is so Significant.--Because, then, the contributions of Athens to our own life are so important, because they touch (as a Greek would say) upon almost every side of ”the true, the beautiful, and the good,” it is obvious that the outward conditions under which this Athenian genius developed deserve our respectful attention. For a.s.suredly such personages as Sophocles, Plato, and Phidias were not isolated creatures, who developed their genius apart from, or in spite of, the life about them, but rather were the ripe products of a society, which in its excellences and weaknesses presents some of the most interesting pictures and examples in the world. To understand the Athenian civilization and genius it is not enough to know the outward history of the times, the wars, the laws, and the lawmakers. We must see Athens as the average man saw it and lived in it from day to day, and THEN perhaps we can partially understand how it was that during the brief but wonderful era of Athenian freedom and prosperity[*], Athens was able to produce so many men of commanding genius as to win for her a place in the history of civilization which she can never lose.

[*]That era may be a.s.sumed to begin with the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.), and it certainly ended in 322 B.C., when Athens pa.s.sed decisively under the power of Macedonia; although since the battle of Chaeroneia (338 B.C.) she had done little more than keep her liberty on sufferance.

3. The Small Size and Sterility of Attica.--Attica was a very small country according to modern notions, and Athens the only large city therein. The land barely covered some 700 square miles, with 40 square miles more, if one includes the dependent island of Salamis.

It was thus far smaller than the smallest of our American ”states”

(Rhode Island = 1250 square miles), and was not so large as many American counties. It was really a triangle of rocky, hill-scarred land thrust out into the aegean Sea, as if it were a sort of continuation of the more level district of B?otia. Yet small as it was, the hills inclosing it to the west, the seas pressing it form the northeast and south, gave it a unity and isolation all its own.

Attica was not an island; but it could be invaded only by sea, or by forcing the resistance which could be offered at the steep mountain pa.s.ses towards B?otia or Megara. Attica was thus distinctly separated from the rest of Greece. Legends told how, when the half-savage Dorians had forced themselves southward over the mainland, they had never penetrated into Attica; and the Athenians later prided themselves upon being no colonists from afar, but upon being ”earth-sprung,”--natives of the soil which they and their twenty-times grandfathers had held before them.

This triangle of Attica had its peculiar shortcomings and virtues.

It was for the most part stony and unfertile. Only a shallow layer of good soil covered a part of its hard foundation rock, which often in turn lay bare on the surface. The Athenian farmer had a st.u.r.dy struggle to win a scanty crop, and about the only products he could ever raise in abundance for export were olives (which seemed to thrive on scanty soil and scanty rainfall) and honey, the work of the mountain bees.